What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating Your First 3D Scene with Three.js, covers the basic steps you need to take to get started with Three.js. You'll immediately create your first Three.js scene and at the end of this chapter, you'll be able to create and animate your first 3D scene directly in your browser.

Chapter 2, Basic Components That Make Up a Three.js Scene, explains the basic components that you need to understand when working with Three.js. You'll learn about lights, meshes, geometries, materials, and cameras. In this chapter, you will also get an overview of the different lights Three.js provides and the cameras you can use in your scene.

Chapter 3, Working with the Different Light Sources Available in Three.js, dives deeper into the different lights you can use in your scene. It shows examples and explains how to use a spotlight, a direction light, an ambient light, a point light, a hemisphere light, and an area light. Additionally, it also shows how to apply a lens flare effect on your light source.

Chapter 4, Working with Three.js Materials, talks about the materials available in Three.js that you can use on your meshes. It shows all the properties you can set to configure the materials for your specific use and provides interactive examples to experiment with the materials that are available in Three.js.

Chapter 5, Learning to Work with Geometries, is the first of two chapters that explores all the geometries that are provided by Three.js. In this chapter, you'll learn how to create and configure geometries in Three.js and can experiment using the provided interactive examples with geometries (such as plane, circle, shape, cube, sphere, cylinder, torus, torusknot, and polyhedron).

Chapter 6, Advanced Geometries and Binary Operations, continues where Chapter 5, Learning to Work with Geometries, left off. It shows you how to configure and use the more advanced geometries provided by Three.js such as convex and lathe. In this chapter, you'll also learn how to extrude 3D geometries from 2D shapes, and how you can create new geometries by combining geometries using binary operations.

Chapter 7, Particles, Sprites, and the Point Cloud, explains how to use a point cloud from Three.js. You'll learn how to create a point cloud from scratch and from existing geometries. In this chapter, you'll also learn how you can modify the way the individual points look through the use of sprites and point cloud materials.

Chapter 8, Creating and Loading Advanced Meshes and Geometries, shows you how to import meshes and geometries from external sources. You'll learn how to use Three.js' internal JSON format to save geometries and scenes. This chapter also explains how to load models from formats such as OBJ, DAE, STL, CTM, PLY, and many more.

Chapter 9, Animations and Moving the Camera, explores the various types of animations you can use to make your scene come alive. You'll learn how to use the Tween.js library together with Three.js, and how to work with animation models based on morphs and skeletons.

Chapter 10, Loading and Working with Textures, expands on Chapter 4, Working with Three.js Materials, where materials were introduced. In this chapter, we dive into the details of textures. This chapter introduces the various types of textures that are available and how you can control how a texture is applied to your mesh. Additionally, in this chapter, you are shown how you can directly use the output from HTML5 video and canvas elements as input for your textures.

Chapter 11, Custom Shaders and Render Postprocessing, explores how you can use Three.js to apply postprocessing effects to your rendered scene. With postprocessing, you can apply effects such as blur, tiltshift, sepia, and so on, to your rendered scene. Besides this, you'll also learn how to create your own postprocessing effect and create a custom vertex and fragment shader.

Chapter 12, Adding Physics and Sounds to Your Scene, explains how you can add physics to your Three.js scene. With physics, you can detect collisions between objects, make them respond to gravity, and apply friction. This chapter shows you how to do this with the Physijs JavaScript library. Additionally, this chapter also shows you how you can add positional audio to a Three.js scene.