Over a weekend about a decade ago, I toyed with making a Final Fantasy Tactics-like game in the browser using CSS for the renderer. I could not get it to work in the time I gave it. I realized too late I needed to make some abstractions and stop trying to manipulate CSS directly.
Which is a long way of saying I appreciate how challenging this probably was to figure out. I love stuff like this.
Hi there! This is not trying to be a three.js replacement, scenes with huge polygon counts naturally should render in canvas.
For me, the interesting case is smaller low-poly or voxel scenes where loading a full 3D stack may be overkill, and where keeping the scene in DOM/CSS gives you easier integration with normal layout, styling, events, etc. Once you have the HTML, you don't even need to load the library to render a static model.
Also, part of the experiment is testing the browser’s limits and getting a clearer sense of where this approach works, where it breaks down, and what the tradeoffs are.
ha, so you could run this on the server and send down a page with no javascript at all? (with, i assume, a static camera only.) that's fun. i mean, you could also just render the model to an image at that point, but still, this is neat.
You can have a dynamic camera with 3D CSS only and no JS. The trick is move the scene instead of the "camera". CSS Doom uses this technique (although unlike the project I'm working on, it relies heavily on JS for the interaction logic).
I'm all for experimentation but getting rid of JS in this case almost certainly results in worse performance. You're trading a bit of load time for significantly slower runtime/rendering.
Huh.... why would a CSS animation of a transform be slower than JS? This is strictly for the "CSS transform" case ofc - obviously pure webgl would be way faster.
I'm having a hard time seeing it. My experiments with CSS animation have always performed much better in CSS than JS (again, excluding it being pure webgl/canvas JS).
And ofc there's the nice bonus that it works if I haven't chosen to trust and whitelist their website for JS yet.
Same thought. Even that simple Apple on the front pages runs < 60fps on my M1 Mac. Rendering 3D objects with CSS is like rendering Doom in Excel Cells. Yes, you can do it. No you should not do it except as a joke/curiosity.
I think the answer is no, as this is a creative repurposing of css3d as a basis for a general 3d engine. That lets you put web content everywhere, even on the triangles of your teapot. Cool, but extravagant
Whereas THREE.js or webgl is purpose-built for realtime animated 3d scenes.
It’s a wide range from an RTS to a simple city builder. I’d say “no” for the former and “maybe” for the latter. Perhaps try it for a couple of hours and see whether you like it or not.
The per-polygon DOM events are what make this more than a trick. Getting click handlers on individual faces in WebGL means raycasting. Here it's just onClick. For certain use cases that's the whole argument.
Which is a long way of saying I appreciate how challenging this probably was to figure out. I love stuff like this.