How did Three.js grow to become the awesome library / community we love?
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Nice video, but I don’t think it explains the rise of three tbh
Thank you pailhead! How do you mean, exactly?
The WebGL car on your website looks fabulous btw.
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Ty! Maybe the examples are a good point indeed, but I was wondering why it won over Babylon. Since both solve the core problem of “you need three pages worth of code to draw a triangle” 
Pmndrs may also play a role, etc
Interesting to hear your view/journey, for me I was a Full Stck Dev turned Senior Flash Developer specialising in Web 3D, my journey took me through PaperVision and then Away3D which I became a contributor of. Then Crapple came along and killed the creativity on the Web (flash), AS3 was a half decent lang fair play but Adobe gave it very little love. Then all hope was on threejs and waiting for the features and support and productivity to get better, and then came babylon and pixi, all still a bit random on crapple devices. Can’t be building 3D configurators for the home page of jaguar.com or Mercedes.com when a minor version bump in ios would stop things working, even certain craptops would fail if you used certain words in shaders but not on other craptops… hopefully WebGPU will sort Crapple out because it will finally give the power to do some cool stuff.
@Darcey Interesting journey! I was a graphic designer turned Senior Flash Developer and I also started with PaperVision. As Flash died I embraced the Haxe language and OpenFL. So when it came time to do a 3D project again I used Away3D. Later the same client wanted to adopt augmented reality which made it necessary to start generating glTF. I began with Google Model Viewer which was based on Three.js. So I fully migrated to Three.js after that, and I’m still combining it with Haxe and OpenFL. Given the wealth of code and other libraries, I’ll be using it for the foreseeable future unless I need to develop for compiled apps.
I started with away3d and agal too!
For me, this is the era where I’m genuinely enjoying this again. My two specialties, programming and 3D art, finally come together. In the early 2000s I flirted with Viewpoint’s VET, but it required plugins. The results were spectacular and I had a great time with it, maybe it was just too far ahead of its time. I skipped Flash entirely, I never warmed up to it. And now, with WebGL running natively in every browser and Three.js in my hands, I’m having the time of my life.
A nice quick summary. I hope you got your steps in!
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My hobby was also 3D programming with an emphasis on flight simulation. Because I had a “need for speed”, I originally wrote my programs in assembly language for the Apple and the Amiga (which had subroutines for 3D programming on ROM)
Once Microsoft had created a decent flight simulator, I switched to creating add-ons for the MS Flight Simulator, including airplanes, ships and landscapes. However, because of the limited resources available, these projects often took months to complete.
When I returned to programming several years ago, I wanted to find a way to share what I had learned and created with others. The combination of the internet, Blender and three.js have provided the perfect medium for doing that. From my perspective, this is a “golden age” where basic programming resources and information are freely available from places like YouTube, GitHub, this forum and elsewhere.
So, like this video, I want to thank Mr. Doob and the other creators of three.js for sacrificing their time, energy and expertise to provide us with this excellent resource.
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Atari ST here, also with Flight Simulator. That “golden age” point really resonates, the combination of open resources, Blender and Three.js is exactly what brought me back too.
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