Recreating Real-World Terrain with React, Three.js and WebGL Shaders

https://techblog.geekyants.com/recreating-real-world-terrain-with-react-threejs-and-webgl-shaders-1

172 51 5 years ago

techblog.geekyants.com

A guide to rendering photo-real terrain with React + Three.js

At first the thought of combining React with Three.js left me scratching my head - but upon closer inspection the added abstraction actually makes sense and it's quite elegant. Thanks for sharing.

Also I had no idea what "frijoles" was, but I now have recipes bookmarked.

gw3• 5 years ago

That looks neat but why would you need a react-style reconciler to render a webgl scene? It's immediate mode...every frame is rendered according to the latest state available. What is even being reconciled?

crypt0x2• 5 years ago

Agreed. Haven't checked out the code but it might because of the text labels in the first example?

Last time I checked rendering text into a webgl context was basically reinventing harfbuzz or using a proper game engine like unity.

Edit: So a reactive way to lay over HTML which properly hooks into the 3d context doesn't sound beyond crazy, at least for web tech standards.

andy_ppp• 5 years ago

Unity?

moron4hire• 5 years ago

Yes, but they are using Three.js, which provides a scene graph structure, basically wrapping WebGL in a retained mode.

brundolf5• 5 years ago

Three.js has an imperative/stateful API for constructing and updating objects, not dissimilar to the DOM. So if your state lives in a separate place, then just like the DOM, you'd have to imperatively patch the view state to keep it in sync. Adding a layer that does this syncing automatically makes a lot of sense to me.

Doing it through React seems a little bit odd... but I haven't looked closely enough to understand why/whether this coupling is actually necessary

gw3• 5 years ago

That makes sense, but it seems like a case of building an abstraction to solve a problem caused by another abstraction. If a scene graph creates a new chore for me that necessitates yet another dependency, i think it'd be simpler to not fuss with these layers at all. That's a choice i don't have with the DOM.

tppiotrowski6• 5 years ago

I believe React developers think in terms of Components now as we used to think of Object/modules in the past. I personally find it easier to encapsulate logic into a Component because it seems more tangible than a plain JS file/module. You can also nest React components to compose logic, for example: composing multiple shaders.

modeless• 5 years ago

Describing WebGL as immediate mode is a little misleading. The rendering is immediate but the API is definitively not. There is a ton of state that needs to be allocated up front, mutated rather than re-created, and eventually torn down. Buffers, textures, shaders, and uniforms are all retained state. There's also the whole OpenGL state machine.

OpenGL used to have a true immediate mode where you called a function for each triangle vertex, and you didn't need shaders or buffers. That mode is not present in WebGL.

throw_m239339• 5 years ago

That looks neat but why would you need a react-style reconciler to render a webgl scene? It's immediate mode...every frame is rendered according to the latest state available. What is even being reconciled?

You don't, it might be a case of VRML cargo-culting or something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

While the DOM has some issues which makes React handy, Three.js and its "display list" have none of these problems, but I guess shoving React somewhere will translate in a better conversion for the authors of that article...

panzerklein• 5 years ago

Here's the answer from the library author: https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1282999626782650368/photo/...

mdoms2• 5 years ago

Looks very cool and there's a ton of good info here. But the final product is unusably laggy on my Dell XPS 13 i7 - not something I'd be happy to put into production.

Edit - thank you for all the replies, we have now established that different hardware renders at different speeds, quite the discovery.

astrea2• 5 years ago

Ran perfectly fine on my Dell Precision with an i7-9850H.

mdoms2• 5 years ago

Yes I understand that different hardware renders things at different speeds, thanks for your input? I'm saying that if something runs like shit on my $3,000 laptop I wouldn't be comfortable putting it into production for a user base that likely has, on average, far less.

PTOB• 5 years ago

Same here. Probably the turbo encabulator on that XPS.

brundolf5• 5 years ago

It probably lacks a discrete graphics card. Not much to be done about that for a fundamentally graphics-concerned project; the only thing I can think of for production would be to disable the 3D content when the client lacks discrete graphics (which, I'm not actually sure whether that can be detected)

Edit: Here's something. You could probably hack something up that would check if the vendor name includes AMD or NVIDIA, or something. Might be fragile though https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGLRender...

esrauch• 5 years ago

The demo in the article would still run full speed on several year old integrated graphics. Probably chrome blacklisted his gpu driver and it's doing pure cpu rendering (or else his driver itself is bugged in a way that is killing the performance).

gdubs• 5 years ago

FWIW it’s zippy as hell on my iPhone 11 Pro.

tppiotrowski6• 5 years ago

The iPhone/iPad GPU's are actually faster than the Intel MacBooks in my experience. I haven't tried an M1 yet, but hopefully it eliminates this performance gap.

vagrantJin2• 5 years ago

It's confirmed that I'm an idiot who happens to just be into WebGl and threejs these last few months. But I must ask about the choice to use React. Is there an actual benefit to using React or is it popular enough to justify its use?

tppiotrowski6• 5 years ago

I think React's main role here is just to provide structure to the code base: React component as the basic unit of logic encapsulation and then composing logic by combining React components.

vagrantJin2• 5 years ago

Got it.

matthoiland• 5 years ago

Very cool demo! And also nice to know my laptop fans still work. (2019 MBP 16", Chrome v84)

pheelicks• 5 years ago

Nice writeup, I always like it when the shaders are highlighted like this. I got started in a similar way 7 years ago and have been making 3D terrains with THREE.js & WebGL since.

The real fun begins when you need to implement some sort of Level-of-Detail system and streaming in data to give the illusion of high detail everywhere without sacrificing performance.

Last year I released an open-source framework (https://github.com/felixpalmer/procedural-gl-js) for creating 3D terrains for web applications, you can see Uluru here: https://www.procedural.eu/map/?longitude=131.036&latitude=-2... (unfortunately the aerial imagery from our default provider isn't as high resolution as other places in Europe)

tppiotrowski6• 5 years ago

Excellent write up. I've been using elevation models for the past few months to create real time shadows overlaid on slippy maps using WebGL. [1]

One thing I learned is that if you really want to recreate "real-world" terrain you have to account for the curvature of the earth. Uluru is over 3km wide and I estimate your image is around 5km. Across this distance the earth will curve 2 meters so you could modify the elevation model to drop off a meter gradually from the center to the edges.

[1] https://shademap.app

onion2k4• 5 years ago

That's ace when it loads, but modifying the time on the bar at the bottom of the screen makes the shadow disappear. I get a NaN in the URL which is presumably related (eg https://shademap.app/#47.62769,24.44286,4z,NaNt). Chrome 88.0.4324.182, OSX, no plugins to speak of. There's a bunch of 404s from Mapbox (eg https://api.mapbox.com/v4/mapbox.terrain-rgb/3/3/6.pngraw?ac...) but no other console errors.

tppiotrowski6• 5 years ago

The 404s from Mapbox are for elevation map tiles over the ocean where elevation is assumed to be 0.

As you pan, zoom and change the time, the url updates so you can share a permalink with others and they see exactly what you do. It looks like somehow you got an invalid timestamp (NaNt should be a timestamp: 1614115393106t). Will dig more into this. Thanks.

tppiotrowski6• 5 years ago

My date/time code only worked with US date MM/DD/YYYY and not DD/MM/YYYY. Fixed now.

And to think 50% of my traffic this month has been from Europe. A lot of users I won't be getting back...

Thanks for the bug report.

onion2k4• 5 years ago

react-three-fiber is a really nice library to make web 3D things with. Three.js is brilliant, but there's a metric ton of boilerplate to get complicated things up and running. react-three-fiber just shuffles that away so you can concentrate on building a graph out of components. I've been getting up to speed with it for a little while and I've been chucking things I've learned in to a Github Pages site - https://onion2k.github.io/r3f-by-example/ Each example can be spun up on Codesandbox with the click of a link eg https://onion2k.github.io/r3f-by-example/examples/geometry/i... (Click the "Fork on Codesandbox" link)

There are tons of good examples of how to use react-three-fiber on Codesandbox - https://codesandbox.io/search?query=react-three-fiber&page=1

codetrotter• 5 years ago

When I went to your site, the “screenshot coming soon” for each of them caught all of my attention so I didn’t notice the fork on codesandbox link.

But why not just have the live WebGL thing on each page itself?

onion2k4• 5 years ago

I'm writing something to generate screenshots at the moment. They'll be there fairly soon.

I could embed the live WebGL, or a codesandbox embed. I might do that eventually.

chrisweekly• 5 years ago

Thanks for the helpful repo and linking to it! Been looking fwd to playing w react-three-fiber...

esperent2• 5 years ago

I haven't followed r3f development for the last six months or so, but previously I tested a couple of examples that were available as both r3f and pure three.js. I tested them on my old, slow mobile - and there seemed to be a big difference, with r3f much slower. When I brought this up with the devs, they have waved it away saying it's because the demos were running in dev mode (or something similar). However, I haven't seen any genuine comparisons of performance in r3f vs three.js, so for now I'm erring on the side of caution and assuming it's slow. I don't know enough about react to create performance tests myself, unfortunately.

onion2k4• 5 years ago

You don't really need to err on the side of caution, you can just try some of the examples. The first example, https://i2160.csb.app/ runs well on my $120 3 year old Android phone. My instanced ducks example, https://os16k.csb.app/ only gets about 15fps but its doing more than most games or sites need albeit in a trivial way.

react-three-fiber isn't a magic bullet that will make all web 3D things fast. You still have to be sensible. It does make it much easier to prototype things though, and a lot of the time performance is great. And if it isn't then most of the code is quite straightforward to move to pure WebGL.

mlsarecmg2• 5 years ago

r3f does not have a performance overhead, it is literally zero. rendering is done in threejs purely, react only takes care of managing the scene. but it can, in situations where the app faces a lot of load, outperform three easily, because it is scheduled, just like a virtual list outperforms a generic list.

migueloller• 5 years ago

If you like this type of stuff, Paul Henschel shares similar content on Twitter [1] and it's absolutely amazing. For example, incredible stuff like this [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/0xca0a [2] https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1357346054635544584

adamredwoods• 5 years ago

Maybe someday we can have geometry shaders in WebGL 3, so we can make nice adaptive LOD.

esperent2• 5 years ago

WebGPU might get geometry shaders.

https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/445

However, an issue is that many mobile GPUs don't support them.

artifact_44• 5 years ago

There's a lot of disinfo in this thread. React-three-fiber is great. Threejs by itself is also great. R3F allows people with minimal low level 3d graphics knowledge, to use higher level constructs they are familiar with, i.e. dom elements and react, to rapidly build compelling interactive 3d experiences. The aframe library is a similar kind of abstraction. WebGL has a thriving ecosystem and IMO is a signpost for the future of visual computing. Cross platform, OS agnostic 3D for the masses.

Recreating Real-World Terrain with React, Three.js and WebGL Shaders

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