Introduction #

npm install three @tresjs/core

yarn add three @tresjs/core

pnpm add three @tresjs/core

Try it online #

You can fork this template example on StackBlitz and play with it 😋 without installing anything locally.

Motivation #

ThreeJS is a wonderful library to create awesome WebGL 3D websites. Is also a constantly updated library that makes hard for wrapper maintainers like TroisJS to keep up with all the enhancements.

React ecosystem has an impresive custom render solution called React-three-fiber that allows you build your scenes declaratively with re-usable, self-contained components that react to state.

In my search for something similar in the VueJS ecosystem, I found this amazing library called Lunchbox which works with the same concept that R3F, it provides a custom Vue3 Renderer. I'm also contributing to improve this library so it gets as mature and feature-rich as R3F.

The only problem is, mixing compilers renderers in Vue 3 is something the Vue community is still working on - see here for more information.

// Example Vite setup
import { createApp } from 'vue'
import { createApp as createLunchboxApp } from 'lunchboxjs'
import App from './App.vue'
import LunchboxApp from './LunchboxApp.vue'

// html app
const app = createApp(App)
app.mount('#app')

// lunchbox app
const lunchboxApp = createLunchboxApp(LunchboxApp)
// assuming there's an element with ID `lunchbox` in your HTML app
lunchboxApp.mount('#lunchbox')

So I was inspired by both libraries to create something that wouldn't require creating a custom renderer but intelligent enough to generate Vue components based on the ThreeJS constructors with 0-to-none manteinance required three:latest. That's TresjS v1.

Although v1 was a decent solution 😄, it has some limitations that would only be solved by creating a proper custom renderer. After several POCs, I decided to create a new version of TresJS that would be based on a Vue custom renderer but saving the user to do any weird stuff. That's TresJS v2.

To learn more how to migrate from v1, check the migration guide.