Three.js now uses ES modules, which means this project is no longer maintained

three-jsnext

Three.js, ported to ES6 modules

Work in progress - more examples etc coming soon! Please excuse the dust.

Why?

Three.js is an incredible library, which makes it possible for us front-end mortals to tap into the power of WebGL. Without it, creating the simplest of scenes involves a vertiginous learning curve.

It's also monolithic and a bit on the chunky side.

You could piece together your own WebGL solution using various small modules, but when you're learning a whole new way of thinking, being able to use a well-thought-through, philosophically coherent library (with loads of examples and an active community of people on Stack Overflow waiting to help you) can make the difference between shipping and failing.

Having your cake and eating it

Or, more accurately, having the whole cake but only eating the bits you like. Let me explain: Normally, when you use a library, you use the whole library, whether as a script tag on the page...

<script src='three.min.js'>

...or as a module...

var THREE = require('three');

...but in the vast majority of situations you're only using a fraction of the library's capabilities.

ES6 modules change everything. Now, you can import components from a library individually. Instead of this...

var THREE = require( 'three' );
var scene = new THREE.Scene();

...you can do this:

import { Scene } from 'three-jsnext';
var scene = new Scene();

Here comes the fun part: using Rollup, we can statically analyse the code and only include the bits of the library that are actually used. The result is that you don't have to ship the whole of three.min.js to your users – you can ship a much smaller bundle.

What this repo does

I didn't manually port Three.js to ES6 modules; that would be crazy. This project takes the existing Three.js code and converts it automatically. (This is possible because the Three.js codebase is very consistent and well-structured.) You can run the conversion yourself:

git clone https://github.com/rollup/three-jsnext.git
cd three-jsnext

# install devDependencies
npm install

# fetch latest version of Three.js
npm run update-three

# convert the files in three.js/src
npm run build

This will create the src and dist folders. (The dist folder just contains a UMD build of the entire library, which you could use as a drop-in replacement for the existing three.min.js file, though see the caveat below. Good news – it's smaller than the original, thanks to ES6 magic!)

How to use it

Have a look at the examples folder to get started. (Note that you'd import from three-jsnext, rather than the relative path used in the examples).

What kind of savings are we talking, really?

Early tests suggests a typical app, once minified, includes around 245kb of Three.js code. The current official build is around 410kb, which means a 40% saving without having to do anything. There may be ways to reduce the size even further by reducing coupling within the Three.js codebase – coupling that makes sense within a monolith, but which in some cases defeat's Rollup's optimisations. Still, a 40% saving for free!

Caveats

This is a new and experimental project; it may not yet reproduce all of Three.js's functionality. If you find a bug, please raise an issue.

Note that we're using the dev branch of Three.js, rather than the master branch, so it may not be 100% stable.

License

Three.js is released under the MIT License, as is three-jsnext.