Three.js puts a WebGL renderer behind a normal <canvas>, and these snippets keep that surface small: a scene, a camera, one or two meshes, and a render loop short enough to read in a single screen. No bundler, no asset pipeline — the library loads from a CDN and the whole demo is self-contained.

The tag covers ambient hero backgrounds, particle and point-cloud fields, shader-driven gradients, rotating product and device viewers, and the orbit-controls patterns that make a 3D object feel inspectable rather than decorative.

The scene graph, kept minimal

Every snippet follows the same skeleton — a Scene, a PerspectiveCamera, a WebGLRenderer sized to its container, one or two meshes, and a light or two if the material needs one. Keeping that skeleton visible rather than burying it behind a framework abstraction is deliberate: it is the part every Three.js tutorial glosses over, and the part you actually need to see once to stop being intimidated by the library.

Particle fields and instancing

When a snippet needs hundreds or thousands of points, it uses a single BufferGeometry with a Points or InstancedMesh object rather than one mesh per particle — the difference between one draw call and thousands. This is also where most of the perceived "3D performance" work actually lives: the GPU handles a hundred thousand instanced points without effort, and the same count as individual meshes will stall a phone.

Shaders, when a material alone will not do

A handful of snippets write a custom vertex or fragment shader with GLSL, passing time or pointer position in as a uniform. This is the lowest-level surface Three.js exposes, and it is worth using sparingly — most visual effects are achievable with a built-in material, and a custom shader is the tool for the specific cases (flowing gradients, distortion, procedural noise) that built-in materials cannot express.

Orbit controls and making a model feel real

OrbitControls with damping enabled is what turns a static rotation into something that feels like it has inertia — the camera keeps drifting slightly after the pointer releases, then settles. Pairing that with a resize handler that recomputes the camera's aspect ratio and the renderer's size is what keeps a 3D viewer usable when the browser window changes shape, which a surprising number of published demos get wrong.

Real-world uses

Common Use Cases

Hero backgrounds with depth

A slow particle field or shader gradient gives a landing page motion that a static image cannot, at a cost you control.

Product and device viewers

Let users orbit a model instead of clicking through five flat photographs — the single highest-value 3D use on a commerce page.

Learning WebGL without the boilerplate

Each snippet is a complete scene, so the parts that usually take an afternoon to wire up are already wired.

Prototyping a shader idea

Edit the fragment shader in the live editor and watch it recompile — no toolchain between the idea and the pixels.

Got questions?

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, though they are the heaviest snippets in the library. Each one clamps devicePixelRatio and resizes with the viewport, which is what keeps a retina phone from rendering four times the pixels it needs. For low-end devices, reduce the particle count or geometry detail first — that is almost always the bottleneck, not the shader.

Keep the id returned by requestAnimationFrame and call cancelAnimationFrame on teardown, then dispose the geometry, materials and renderer. The framework exports do this in the cleanup function; if you paste the raw JS into a single-page app, add it yourself or the loop keeps running against a detached canvas.

Yes — add GLTFLoader from the same CDN, load your .glb, and add the returned scene to the existing scene graph. The camera, lighting and resize handling in these snippets stay exactly as they are.

No. Every snippet is plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript that runs in any page — a static file, a WordPress theme, a Rails view, anything. When you do want a framework version, the editor exports each snippet as a React component, a React + Tailwind component, a standalone Tailwind HTML file, a Vue 3 single-file component or an Angular standalone component.

Yes — copy, modify and ship them in personal or commercial work, with no attribution required and no licence to track.

Yes. Every snippet opens in a live editor with separate HTML, CSS and JS panels and a preview that updates as you type. Check it at mobile, tablet and desktop widths, then copy the code or export it in your framework of choice.

Tags that appear alongside Three.js

Canvas 3D Effects GSAP Scroll Animation Glassmorphism JS Libraries CSS Animation Micro-Interactions All tags →

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