3d

Before becoming a web developer, I worked in the visual effects industry, creating award-winning, high-end 3D effects for movies and TV Shows such as Tron, The Thing, Resident Evil, and Vikings. To be able to create these effects, we would need to use highly sophisticated animation software such as Maya, 3Ds Max or Houdini and do long hours of offline rendering on Render Farms that consisted of hundreds of machines. It's because I worked with these tools for so long that I am now amazed by the state of the current web technology. We can now create and display high-quality 3D content right inside the web browser, in real time, using WebGL and Three.js.

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Let's say we wanted to have something like this:

At first, this doesn't seem too complicated. We start with 12 numbered items:

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I know there are a ton of pure CSS cube tutorials out there. I've done a few myself. But for mid-2017, when CSS Custom Properties are supported in all major desktop browsers, they all feel... outdated and very WET. I thought I should do something to fix this problem, so this article was born. It's going to show you the most efficient path towards building a CSS cube that's possible today, while also explaining what common, but less than ideal cube coding patterns you should steer clear of. So let's get started!

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Virtual reality has become a thing again! All of the usual suspects are involved: HTC, Microsoft, Samsung, and Facebook, among others, are all peddling their respective devices. These predictable players shouldn’t be having all the fun, though!

You make websites. You know a bit of Javascript. You have a mobile device. You can have a slice of this virtual pie too! WebVR is here, and it’s not that difficult to learn. If you already know the basics of three.js, you might be surprised at how simple it is to get it going. If you haven’t ever used three.js, this will be a fun way to learn it.

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As some people might know, I've always loved 3D geometry. Which has meant getting drawn towards playing with CSS 3D transforms in order to create various geometric shapes. I've built a huge collection of such demos, which you can check out on CodePen.

Because of this, I've often been asked whether it would be possible to create responsive 3D shapes using, for example, % values instead of the em values my demos normally use. The answer is a bit more complex than a yes/no answer, so I thought it would be a good idea to put it in an article. Let's dive in!

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I've always loved 3D geometry. I began playing with CSS 3D transforms as soon as I noticed support in CSS was getting decent. But while it felt natural to use transforms to create 2D shapes and move/rotate them in 3D to create polyhedra, there were some things that tripped me up at first. I thought I might write about the things that surprised me and the challenges I encountered so that you might avoid the same.

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