Category: gthree

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I spent some time converting three.js into a Gtk+ library, called gthree.

It was never really used for anything and wasn’t really product quality. However, I really like the idea of having an easy way to add some 3D effects to Gnome apps.

Also, time has moved on and three.js got cool new features like a PBR material and a GLTF support.

So, last week I spent some time refreshing gthree to the latest shaders from three.js, adding a GLTF loader and a few new features, ported to meson and did some general cleanup/polish. I still want to add some more features in like skinning, morphing and animations, but just the new rendering is showing off just how cool this stuff is:

Here is a screencast showing off the model viewer:

Cool, eh!

I have to do some other work too, but I hope to get some more time in the future to work on gthree and to use it for something interesting.

I’ve recently been working on OpenGL support in Gtk+, and last week it landed in master. However, the demos we have are pretty lame and are not very good to show off or even test the OpenGL support. I’ve looked around for some open source demos that used modern GL that we could use, but I didn’t find anything that we could easily use.

What I did find though, was a lot of WebGL demos that used three.js. This looked like a very nice open source library for highlevel 3d rendering. At first I had some plans to bind OpenGL to gjs so that we could run three.js, but this turned out to be a hard.

Instead I started converting three.js into C + GObject, using the Gtk+ OpenGL support and the vector/matrix library graphene that Emmanuele has been working on recently.

After about a week of frantic hacking it is now at a stage where it may be interesting for others. So, without further ado I introduce:

https://github.com/alexlarsson/gthree

It does not yet support everything that three.js can do, but it does support a meshes with most mesh matrial types and lighting, including a loader for the json model format of thee.js, which means that it is minimally useful.

Here are some screenshots of the examples that ships with the code:

This has been a lot of fun to work on as I’ve seen a lot of progress very fast. Mad props to mrdoob and the other three.js developers for creating three.js and making it free software. Gthree is a huge rip-off of their work and would never be possible without it. Thanks also to Emmanuele for his graphene library.

What are you sitting here for, go ahead and play with it! Make some demos, port some more three.js features, marvel at the fancy graphics!