react-three-fiber is a powerful Three.js renderer that helps render 3D models and animations for React and its native applications. In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure and build 3D models in a React application.

Today, we’re going to learn how to configure and use react-three-fiber for building and displaying 3D models and animations in React and React Native applications.

This tutorial is for developers who want to learn more about 3D model animations in the web using React and for anyone who’s had limitations with Three.js like inability to create canvas, bind user events like click events and start a render loop, react-three-fiber comes with these methods. We’ll be building a 3D model to better understand how to build Three.js 3D models using react-three-fiber.

Getting Started With react-three-fiber

Three.js is a library that makes it easier to create 3D graphics in the browser, it uses a canvas + WebGL to display the 3D models and animations, you can learn more here.

react-three-fiber is a React renderer for Three.js on the web and react-native, it is a boost to the speed at which you create 3D models and animations with Three.js, some examples of sites with 3D models and animations can be found here. react-three-fiber reduces the time spent on animations because of its reusable components, binding events and render loop, first let’s take a look at what is Three.js.

react-three-fiber allows us to build components of threeJS code using React state, hooks and props, it also comes with the following elements:

How To Use react-three-fiber

To use react-three-fiber, you start by using the commands below:

NPM

npm i three react-three-fiber

YARN

yarn add three react-three-fiber 

Note: For _react-three-fiber_ to work, you’ll need to install _three_ (Three.js) as we did above.

Building A React 3D Ludo Dice Model And Animation Project

Here we are going to build a 3D ludo dice model using react-three-fiber like we have in the video below.

3D Ludo Dice Model from Smashing Magazine on Vimeo.

We will be using create-react-app to initialize our project, to do that let’s execute the command below on our terminal.

create-react-app react-three-fiber-ludo-model

The command above initializes a React project within our local machine, next let’s cd into the directory and install our packages react-three-fiber and three.

cd react-three-fiber-ludo-model

npm i three react-three-fiber

Once, the packages are installed, let’s start our development server using the command

npm start

The above command should start our project development server in our browser. Next let’s open our project in our text editor of choice, inside our project src folder, delete the following files: App.css, App.test.js, serviceWorker.js and setupTests.js. Next, let’s delete all code that references the deleted files on our App.js.

For this project, we will need a Box component for our ludo dices and our App component that’s given by React.

#react #javascript #three.js #web-development #developer