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Your first scene

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

Setting up the experience Canvas

Before we can create a Scene, we need somewhere 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 add the default component <TresCanvas /> to the template of your Vue component.

vue
<template>
  <TresCanvas>
    <!-- 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 scene:

  • 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.

Creating a scene

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

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.

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

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

vue
<template>
  <TresCanvas>
    <TresPerspectiveCamera />
  </TresCanvas>
</template>

Adding a 🍩

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

ts
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 <TresMesh /> component, and between the default slots, we are going to pass a <TresTorusGeometry /> and a <TresMeshBasicMaterial />.

vue
<template>
  <TresCanvas>
    <TresPerspectiveCamera />
    <TresMesh>
      <TresTorusGeometry />
      <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 Object you want to use in CamelCase with a Tres prefix. For example, if you want to use an AmbientLight you would use <TresAmbientLight /> component.

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.