We have 1 geometry that gets attached to every mesh in our scene.
var geometry = new three.PlaneGeometry(1, 1, 1, 1),
Everything has a texture that we generate and cache to create a new material and a mesh for each object.
this.material = new three.MeshLambertMaterial({
transparent: true,
emissive: 0xffffff
});
// get the cached texture
this.material.map = this.getTexture(this.attributes);
this.shape = new three.Mesh(geometry, this.material);
Afterwards we add these shapes into various Object3Ds in order to move large groups of shapes around.
This all works great on nicer devices and up to 5000 circles, but then our framerate starts to drop. On weaker devices this is dramatically slower even with say 100 meshes. We know that merging geometries can speed things up; however, we only have a single geometry that is shared. Is it possible to merge meshes? Does that even make sense? Note: These shapes are interactive (movable/clickable). What are our options?
Other notes:
We are using Ejecta on mobile devices, which is great at low mesh counts, but not so great after 100 meshes. I don't think its Ejecta's fault, but rather our lack of knowledge about how to optimize! Also even on desktop our app has some CPU usage amount that we find suspicious.
Figured it out! We went from being able to render 5k things at 60fps to 100k things at approx 40fps.
We followed what most people are saying out there about merging meshes, but it took some experimentation to really understand what was happening and getting multiple textures/materials to work.
for (var i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
// creates a mesh from the geometry and material from the question and returns an object
circle = ourCircleFactory.create();
circle.shape.updateMatrix();
sceneGeometry.merge(circle.shape.geometry, circle.shape.matrix, circle.cachedMaterialIndex);
}
var finalMesh = new three.Mesh(sceneGeometry, new THREE.MeshFaceMaterial(cachedMaterials));
scene.add(finalMesh);
That code will create 1 geometry per cached material. cachedMaterialIndex is something we created to cache textures and indicate which material to use.
It is likely that this code will create 1 geometry per combination of material and geometry. EG: if you have 5 geometries and they are interchangeable with 5 materials then you will get 25 geometries. It seems that it doesn't matter how many objects you have on screen. Note: we were getting 15fps with 5000 geometries so I think this is a fairly cheap solution.
Related
I have a sphere with multiple moving points on it, and I am drawing curves connecting the points like this:
Since the points are moving, I draw these curves for every frame, and thus there is a lot of memory overhead that I am worried about.
Each curve is drawn with
// points = array of Three.Vector3 size 40
path = new THREE.CatmullRomCurve3(points)
mesh = new THREE.Mesh(
new THREE.TubeGeometry(path,64,0.5,false), // geometry
new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color: 0x0000ff}) // material
)
scene.add(mesh)
and for disposal:
scene.remove(mesh)
mesh.material.dispose()
mesh.geometry.dispose()
It does not let me, however, dispose of my array of 40 Three.js vectors points and of my CatmullRomCurve3 path.
What is the issue, and how do I dispose of the new THREE.Vector3() and new THREE.CatmullRomCurve3().
What is the issue, and how do I dispose of the new THREE.Vector3() and new THREE.CatmullRomCurve3().
dispose() methods in three.js are mainly intended to free GPU memory which is associated with JS objects like geometries, materials, textures or render targets. Instantiating curves and plain math entities like Vector3 do not cause an allocation of GPU memory.
Hence, it should be sufficient to just remove any references to path so it can be cleaned up by the GC.
I'm working on a simple demonstration in three.js and am confused by the behaviour of THREE.MeshPhongMaterial coming from a background in the Unity Game Engine.
create_ring() {
// creates a ring mesh per inputed class data
const material = new THREE.MeshPhongMaterial({
color: this.color,
emissive: this.color,
emissiveIntensity: 1.6
});
const ring_geo = new THREE.TorusGeometry(this.radius, this.thickness, 16, 100);
// Translate in space
ring_geo.translate(5, 5, 0)
// add texture to mesh and output
const ring_mesh = new THREE.Mesh(ring_geo, material);
ring_mesh.receiveShadow = true;
ring_mesh.castShadow = true;
ring_mesh.name = "ring";
return ring_mesh
}
I was under the impression the materials would create a nice gentle pool of light on the floor geometry but now having researched the problem either I need some advice on how to implement this as a shader feature? Or I'm not understanding the limits and behaviour of materials in three.js? Below is an example of what is possible with a material's emissive option in Unity.
There's more than just an emissive material shown in the Unity screenshot above — the objects around the light probably were probably also marked as static, which Unity uses to "bake" the glow effect onto them, while compiling the application. There could also be a "bloom" post-processing effect to create the dynamic glow seen by the camera around the object.
Because three.js runs on the web and does not have an offline compilation step, these additional effects have to be configured manually. You can see the three.js bloom example for some help adding the bloom effect to a scene. Baking the light onto surrounding objects would generally be done in Blender, and then loaded into three.js with the base color texture or a lightmap.
I'm learning ThreeJS for 4 months, applying it into a personal project.
Yesterday, I achieved building a stronghold using most of ThreeJS geometries and some CSG tricks. The result looks fine, but I like precision and my geometry is kind of a mess (mostly after CSG subtractions).
[Question] I wonder if there's a known way to merge two geometries and replacing its old faces by new computed faces ? There is a JSFiddle to illustrate my question.
[Edit : Updated the fiddle with a fourth and a fifth mesh]
// FIGURE 1 : Basic merged geometry
var figure1 = new THREE.Geometry();
figure1.merge(box1Geometry);
figure1.merge(box2Geometry);
figure1.merge(box3Geometry);
figure1.computeFaceNormals();
figure1.computeVertexNormals();
var mesh = new THREE.Mesh(figure1, material);
scene.add(mesh);
// FIGURE 2 : Merged geometry with merged vertices
var figure2 = figure1.clone();
figure2.mergeVertices();
figure2.computeFaceNormals();
figure2.computeVertexNormals();
mesh = new THREE.Mesh(figure2, material);
// FIGURE 3 : Expected merged geometry (less faces)
var figure3 = new THREE.Geometry();
figure3`.vertices.push(
// manually create vertices here
);
figure3.faces.push(
// manually create the faces here
);
figure3.computeBoundingSphere();
figure3.computeFaceNormals();
figure3.computeVertexNormals();
mesh = new THREE.Mesh(figure3, material);
scene.add(mesh);
Three ways to get the same mesh
The first mesh on the left is a basic merged geometry composed of three boxGeometry.
The second mesh in the middle is exactly the same mesh, after calling the mergeVertices() function. It results saving 4 vertices. But faces inside the mesh are still there. It results not only in looking bad (for me), but also in issues for texturing or lighting these parts (face normals aren't where they should be).
The last mesh on the right is the mesh I would expect after merging. Look at the faces below the middle box, they only fit what they should.
The fact that it leads to texture and lighting issues (look at the JSFiddle, it lights the inner parts of the mesh) makes me think that it must be a simple and well-known way to solve this but I'm just feeling like a big noob.
This issue is directly linked with another question I'll ask if I don't find (or understand) any answer on SO (and maybe it'll help you to understand why I want to do that): Is there a way to apply a texture on this merged geometry without creating an unique material for each face of each geometry (because of the different UV mapping and mesh sizes) ? I can't imagine to do it manually for each face of my huge stronghold...
[EDIT] Writing my question, I just realized that ThreeCSG and its union() function do the trick. But I don't like the mess of vertices it creates. Even for basic geometry like these boxes, ThreeCSG will create strange vertices and faces on parts of the geometry where everything was already fine.
I updated the JSFiddle with a fourth mesh (CSG). In this simple usecase, we can see that there are 2 vertices and 2 faces more than expected. It seems that it kept the old faces (look at the wireframe !).
Is ThreeCSG union the best option for now ?
[EDIT 2] Fiddle updated with native CSG geometry. It gives the result I expected with only 20 vertices and 32 faces. Thanks to Wilt for this idea. The issue is that hard coding the polygons takes too long (take a look at the code for only three boxes). I have no JSON file to load and generate the polygons, I only have ThreeJS geometries. So I'll look at the conversion between ThreeJS and ThreeCSG geometries and I hope to understand why when there is a conversion, it gives a bad result.
I have a 3D model of my home town. I would like to use real time data to change the height of the buildings. In my first try, I loaded the buildings as individual meshes and called scene.add(buildingMesh) during setup.
var threeObjects = []
var buildingMesh = new THREE.Mesh(geometry, material)
threeObjects.push(buildingMesh);
$.each(threeObjects,function(i, buildingMesh)
{
buildingMesh.rotation.x += -3.1415*0.5;
buildingMesh.castShadow = true;
buildingMesh.receiveShadow = true;
scene.add(buildingMesh);
});
Which is too slow as my dataset consists of roughly 10.000 building.
So I took the approach to add all the (geometries of the) meshes to a single geometry and wrap that in a mesh to be added to the scene
singleGeometry.merge(buildingMesh.geometry, buildingMesh.matrix); //in a loop
var faceColorMaterial = new THREE.MeshLambertMaterial( { color: 0xffffff, vertexColors: THREE.VertexColors } );
combinedMesh = new THREE.Mesh(singleGeometry, faceColorMaterial);
scene.add(combinedMesh);
Just to make a proof of concept, I'm trying to change the height of a building when I click it. Alas, this is not working.
By adding a new id field, I can get a reference to the faces and vertices and change the color of the building, but I can not for the life of me, get them to to change height.
In my first version, I would just use something like:
buildingMesh.scale.z=2;
But as I have no meshes anymore, I'm kinda lost.
Can anybody help?
disclaimer: I'm new to Three.js, so my question might be stupid...hope it's not :)
If you combine all of your buildings into a single geometry, you're obliterating everything that makes the buildings distinct from each other. Now you can't tell building A from building B because it's all one big geometry, and geometry at its basic level is literally just arrays of points and polygons with no way of telling any of it apart. So I think it's the wrong approach to merge it all together.
Instead, you should take advantage of three.js's efficient scene graph architecture. You had the right idea at first to just add all the buildings to a single root Object3D ("scene"). That way you get all the efficiencies of the scene graph but can still individually address the buildings.
To make it load more efficiently, instead of creating the scene graph in three.js every time you load the app, you should do it ahead of time in a 3D modeling program. Build the parent/child relationships there, and export it as a single model containing all of the buildings as child nodes. When you import it into three.js, it should retain its structure.
JCD: That was not quite the question I asked.
But anyhow, I found a solution to the problem.
What I did was to merge all the geometries, but in stead of using the standard clone function in geometry.merge() I used a shallow reference, which made it possible for me to use the reference in threeObjects to find the correct building and resize the part of the geometry using Mesh.scale, followed by a geometry.verticesNeedUpdate = true;
For further optimization, I split the model into 5 different geometries and only updated the geometry that contained the building
I've been putting together a 3d model of a house and right now I'm stuck with yet another aggravating roadblock like those three.js has gotten me accustomed to.
I'm creating my scene in Maya and using the OBJ exporter to write obj and mtl files that I then import into three.js. I have about 9 objects in my scene, ungrouped, children only to the world, history deleted, and with texture maps that have ambient occlusion and lighting baked into them assigned to them via shadingMaps.
I've actually had little luck actually using the mtl file, so I just copied my texture maps and loaded them separately and created materials out of them in three.js.
Now, all of these objects look just fine in the browser, except for the simplest one, the walls and floor object. This is what the object looks like in Maya:
As you can see, a rather simple mesh with minimal polys looking beautiful in Maya.
I've learned that when I export objects into obj files, only one UV channel is supported, so I copy my UVs into the default channel and delete all other UV channels before exporting. This is the UV map:
But when I assign this material in the browser, I get a strange texture distortion like so:
It's like the UVs are all over the place. I would seriously doubt that my approach is anywhere close to being on target if it weren't for those 8 other (more complex, mind you) objects which all display fine.
, including part of the wall that I've cut out of the problematic piece, which is part of the bathroom.
Does anyone have a clue as to how I can troubleshoot this? I've tried exporting straight to js from Maya, but I'm having even more problems with that approach. I've tried converting the obj file into js using the packaged browser-based converter. I've spent days on this and am not making any progress.
Here's some relevant code.
scene = new THREE.Scene();
renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer({antialias: true} );
var wallTexture = THREE.ImageUtils.loadTexture("obj/final_walls.jpg");
var wallMaterial = new THREE.MeshLambertMaterial( {color: 0x929EAC, map:wallTexture} );
var manager = new THREE.LoadingManager();
var loader = new THREE.OBJMTLLoader( manager );
loader.load( 'obj/wallOnly.obj','obj/wallOnly.mtl', function ( object ) {
object.children[2].material = wallMaterial;
floorplan.add(object);
camera.lookAt( object );
} );
Please help!!
OMG! After running my head through the wall, I finally found the solution!
I've discovered that the problem was not as much a distortion of the texture as it was a random swapping of uv faces. That's right! For some reason, the webGL renderer randomly swapped some faces of the object with others.
Out of total coincidence I turned my mesh into quads instead of triangles and, voila!, that fixed everything. QUADS!!! I wasted friggin 3 solid days on triangles!!!