My scene is pretty simple. I have a (Ground) Plane and a sphere on top of it. I am setting an emissive material to the sphere. Now, I want reflection of the emitted light by the sphere on the plane.
Looks like that is not possible in a straight-forward way. (I totally wish THREE.js was like Maya or Blender). And from what I have looked around, point lights were suggested. But I am having a gradient emission map. So a point light will not satisfy my needs here.
Some other answers have suggested something on the lines of capturing the scene by a reflection surface and other have pointed me to cube camera rendering....I do not totally understand what they mean - am quite new to THREE.js and this low a level of graphics. Especially this answer to a beginner like me looks daunting (I am just starting to mess with shaders). Emissive ligth and reflection in Three.js
If anyone can explain the method or provide resources where I can learn about them, I would be grateful.
Using three.js am trying to create a floor that reflects the objects that sit upon it. Preferably the floor material should reflect not like a mirror but in a more 'matte' or diffused way.
To achieve this I looked to Jaume Sanchez Elias who has made a great example using a cube camera: Look for the "smooth material" example on this page:
http://www.clicktorelease.com/blog/making-of-cruciform
Here is my attempt using the same technique. But as you see the reflections are misplaced, they do not appear underneath the mountain objects as expected.
http://dev.udart.dk/stackoverflow_reflections/
I am looking to correct this or to use any other technique that will achieve a more correct diffused reflection.
There are three.js examples using the cube camera technique but they all create mirror-like effects not a soft reflection.
Vibber. Parallax-corrected cubemaps, the technique used in cru·ci·form, only works for closed volumes, like cubes. It works really well to simulate correct reflections inside a room, but not so much for outdoors or open/large scenes. They also can't reflect anything that it's inside the cubemap, you'd have to split the volume in many sub-volumes.
I can think of a couple of solutions for what you want to achieve:
SSR: Screen-space reflections, you can find more info in many places on the internet. It's not the most trivial of effects to implement, and you might have to change the way you render your scene.
Simpler post-processing approach: since you have a flat floor, render the mountains vertically flipped on a framebuffer object, blur it, and render the regular scene on top. For extra effect, render the depth of the flipped mountains, and use that value as the blur radius, to get diffuse reflections.
As always, there's a ton of ways to achieve the (un)expected result :)
Does Three.JS have a function or capability of AI( Artificial intelligence )? Specifically let's say a FPS game. I want enemies to look for me and try to kill me, is it possible in three.js? Do they have a functionality or a system of such?
Webgl
create buffer
bind buffer
allocate data
set up state
issue draw call
run GLSL shaders
three.js
create a 3d context using WebGL
create 3 dimensional objects
create a scene graph
create primitives like spheres, cubes, toruses
move objects around, rotate them scale them
test for intersections between rays, triangles, planes, spheres, etc.
create 'materials' (rather than shaders)
javascript
write algorithms
I want enemies to look for me and try to kill me
Yes, three.js is capable of doing this, you just have to write an algorithm using three's classes. Your enemies would be 3d objects, casting rays, intersecting with other objects, etc.
You would be building a game engine, and you could use three.js as your rendering framework within that engine. Rendering is just one part of it. Think of a 2d shooter, you could make it using a 2d context, but you could also enhance it and make it 2.5d, by working with a 3d context. Everything else can stay the same.
any webgl engine that might have it ? or is it just not a webgl thing
Unity probably has everything you can possibly think of. Unity is capable of outputting WebGL, so it could be considered a 'webgl engine'.
Bablyon.js is more engine like.
Three Js is the best and most powerfull WebGL 3d engine that has no equal on the market , and its missing out on such an ability
Three.js isn't exactly a 3d engine. Wikipedia says:
Three.js is a lightweight cross-browser JavaScript library/API used to
create and display animated 3D computer graphics on a Web browser.
Three.js uses WebGL.
so if i need to just draw a car, or a spinning logo, i don't need them to come looking for me, or try to shoot me. I just need them to stay in one place, and rotate.
For a graphics demo you don't even need this - with a few draw instructions, you could render a full screen quad with a very elaborate pixel shader. Three gives you a ton of options, especially if you consider all the featured examples.
It works both ways, while you can expand three.js anyway you want, you can strip it down for just a very specific purpose.
If you need to build an app that needs to do image processing, and feature no '3d' graphics, you could still leverage webgl with three.js.
You don't need any vector, matrix, ray , geometry classes.
If you don't have vector3, you probably cant keep planeGeometry, but you would use bufferGeometry, and manually construct a plane. No transformations need to happen, so no need for matrix classes. You'd use shaders, and textures, and perhaps something like the EffectsComposer.
I’m afraid not. Three.js is just a engine for displaying 3d content.
Using it to create games only is one possibility. However few websites raise with pre-coded stuff like AI (among other things) to attract game creators, but using them is more restrictive than writing the exact code you need
Three.js itself doesn't however https://mugen87.github.io/yuka/ is a great AI engine that can work in collaboration with three to create AI.
They do a line if sight and a shooting game logic, as well as car logic which I've been playing around with recently, a React Three Fiber example here: https://codesandbox.io/s/loving-tdd-u1fs9o
I've always found lighting and shading to be the most difficult part of WebGL / Three.js to get right – I feel like I'm making it up.
What combination of lighting and shading do you think I would need to achieve a similar look and feel to the following image? It's so soft and yet well-defined, whereas my attempts always come out harsh and haphazard.
http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_shadowmap
http://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_morphtargets_horse
This examples use the same lightning effect, check out the Code.
I create a THREE.PlaneGeometry with heights, in the highest point locate a THREE.PointLight, but this illuminates areas that are not seen from this point.
Why?
I want light from a point only the areas that are viewed from.
By default, the appearance of any given point on a surface is calculated using the lights, their properties and of course the material properties - it does not take the rest of the scene into account, as that would be very computationally expensive. Various ray tracing renderers do this, but they are really slow, and that's not how WebGL and Three.js work.
What you want is shadows. Three.js is capable of rendering shadows using Shadow Map method. There are various examples on using shadow maps both on the net and Three.js examples folder.
A word of warning though, getting shadows to work well can be hard if you don't have the basics down well - you may need to do some studying. Shadows can slow your application down (specially with many lighs) and look ugly if not properly configured and fine-tuned. Also I think shadow maps are only supported for SpotLight and DirectionalLight, PointLights are trickier.