Verge3D’s relationship with Three.js

Hi Adam,

Indeed, initially Verge3D was based on Three.js, but now we can say for sure that these are completely different products. Verge3D is a tool for artists and professional 3D devs focusing on productivity, while Three.js is good for WebGL/WebGPU hacking.

From time to time we grab some useful features from Three.js and integrate them to Verge3D and will continue doing so (feel free to suggest!). Hopefully this way, our product will continue to be far superior and efficient compared to Three.js in a long run.

P.S. I personally don’t see any reasons at all to use Three.js over Verge3D, except the financial one. Indeed, investing $290 to a software product can be unrealistic for some categories of people. However, I believe these are mostly the psychological barriers than the actual lack of money.

P.P.S. I don’t really think WebGPU is the right approach to making efficient 3D web interactives, basically for typical Verge3D apps it won’t offer any benefits compared to well-established and well-thought WebGL. With all that said we’ll of course support this tech if we have no choice.

adamabr wrote:

I personally think WebGPU is very interesting as it among other things enables compute shaders, which would be very cool for heavy computations like physics simulations. I might be a minority though.

Using GPU compute is also possible with WebGL. The issue is that not all physics simulations can be easily done on GPU. This is why modern games still depend on high-performance, multi-core CPUs alongside GPUs.

adamabr wrote:

Does picking out only specific features from Three.js have to do with keeping Verge3D fast to load and performant to run? Or does it have to do with you not wanting to spend the time to bring over functionality you think might be irrelevant for your users?

Actually, we keep both ideas in mind. There are features from Three.js that are completely irrelevant for typical Verge3D use cases. Some that were removed recently: phong materials, non-physical lighting, hemisphere lights (we’re going to completely phase them out in the upcoming releases), simplistic PCF shadows, JSON serialization, and so on.