Summary

That’s it for this first chapter. In this chapter, you learned how to set up your development environment, how to get the code, and how to get started with the examples provided in this book. Then, you learned that to render a scene with Three.js, you have to create a THREE.Scene object and add a camera, a light source, and the objects that you want to render. We also showed you how you can expand this basic scene by adding animations. Lastly, we added a couple of helper libraries. We used lil-GUI, which allows you to quickly create control UIs, and we added an FPS counter, which provided feedback on the frame rate and other metrics using which your scene is rendered.

All these items will help you understand the examples in upcoming chapters and make it easier for you to experiment with the more advanced examples and start modifying those to your liking. Should stuff break or not result in what you expect in the next few chapters when you experiment, remember what we showed you in this chapter: use the JavaScript console to get additional information, add debug statements, use the helpers provided by Three.js, or add custom control elements.

In the next chapter, we’ll expand on the basic setup shown here and you’ll learn more about the most important building blocks that you can use in Three.js.