Your first scene

This guide will help you to create your first Tres scene. 🍩

Setting up the experience Canvas

Before we can create a ThreeJS Scene, we need a space to display it. Using plain ThreeJS we would need to create a canvas HTML element to mount the WebglRenderer and initialize the Scene.

With TresJS you only need to import the default component <TresCanvas /> and add it to the template of your Vue component.

<script lang="ts" setup>
import { TresCanvas } from '@tresjs/core'
</script>

<template>
  <TresCanvas window-size>
    <!-- Your scene goes here -->
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

WARNING

It's important that all components related to the scene live between the <TresCanvas /> component. Otherwise, they will be not rendered.

The TresCanvas component is going to do some setup work behind the scenes:

• It creates a WebGLRenderer that automatically updates every frame.
• It sets the render loop to be called on every frame based on the browser refresh rate.

Canvas size

By default, TresCanvas component will take the parent's width and height, if you are experiencing a blank page make sure the parent element has a proper size.

<script lang="ts" setup>
import { TresCanvas } from '@tresjs/core'
</script>

<template>
  <TresCanvas>
    <!-- Your scene goes here -->
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

<style>
html,
body {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
}
#app {
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
}
</style>

If your scene is not gonna be part of a UI, you can also force the canvas to take the width and height of the full window by using the window-size prop like this:

<script lang="ts" setup>
import { TresCanvas } from '@tresjs/core'
</script>

<template>
  <TresCanvas window-size>
    <!-- Your scene goes here -->
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

Creating a scene

We need 4 core elements to create a 3D experience:

• A Scene to hold the camera and the object(s) together.
• A Renderer to render the scene into the DOM.
• A Camera
• An Object

With TresJS you only need to add the <TresCanvas /> component to the template of your Vue component and it will automatically create a Renderer (canvas DOM Element) and Scene for you.

<template>
  <TresCanvas window-size>
    <!-- Your scene goes here -->
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

Then you can add a PerspectiveCamera using the <TresPerspectiveCamera /> component.

<template>
  <TresCanvas window-size>
    <TresPerspectiveCamera />
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

WARNING

A common issue is that the camera default position is the origin of the scene (0,0,0). TresJS will automatically set the position of your camera to [3,3,3] if the prop position is not set by you. If no camera is defined in you scene, a perspective camera is added automatically.

Adding a 🍩

That scene looks a little empty, let's add a basic object. If we were using plain ThreeJS we would need to create a Mesh object and attach to it a Material and a Geometry like this:

const geometry = new THREE.TorusGeometry(1, 0.5, 16, 32)
const material = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({ color: 'orange' })
const donut = new THREE.Mesh(geometry, material)
scene.add(donut)

A Mesh is a basic scene object in three.js, and it's used to hold the geometry and the material needed to represent a shape in 3D space.

Now let's see how we can easily achieve the same with TresJS. To do that we are going to use the <TresMesh /> component, and between the default slots, we are going to pass a <TresTorusGeometry /> and a <TresMeshBasicMaterial /> component.

<template>
  <TresCanvas window-size>
    <TresPerspectiveCamera />
    <TresMesh>
      <TresTorusGeometry :args="[1, 0.5, 16, 32]" />
      <TresMeshBasicMaterial color="orange" />
    </TresMesh>
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

INFO

Notice that we don't need to import anything, that's because TresJS automatically generate a Vue Component based on the three objects you want to use in PascalCase with a Tres prefix. For example, if you want to use an AmbientLight you would use the <TresAmbientLight /> component.

<script setup lang="ts">
import { TresCanvas } from '@tresjs/core'
</script>

<template>
  <TresCanvas
    clear-color="#82DBC5"
    window-size
  >
    <TresPerspectiveCamera
      :position="[3, 3, 3]"
      :look-at="[0, 0, 0]"
    />
    <TresMesh>
      <TresTorusGeometry :args="[1, 0.5, 16, 32]" />
      <TresMeshBasicMaterial color="orange" />
    </TresMesh>
    <TresAmbientLight :intensity="1" />
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

From here onwards you can start adding more objects to your scene and start playing with the properties of the components to see how they affect the scene.