Simon Willison’s Weblog

<model-viewer> Web Component by Google (via) I learned about this Web Component from Claude when looking for options to render a .glb file on a web page. It's very pleasant to use:

<model-viewer style="width: 100%; height: 200px"
  src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors-allow/2024/a-pelican-riding-a-bicycle.glb"
  camera-controls="1" auto-rotate="1"
></model-viewer>

Here it is showing a 3D pelican on a bicycle I created while trying out BlenderGPT, a new prompt-driven 3D asset creating tool (my prompt was "a pelican riding a bicycle"). There's a comment from BlenderGPT's creator on Hacker News explaining that it's currently using Microsoft's TRELLIS model.

# 13th December 2024, 6:46 pm / web-components, google, generative-ai, ai, 3d, blender, microsoft, claude, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

Tree.js interactive demo (via) Daniel Greenheck's interactive demo of his procedural tree generator (as in vegetation) built with Three.js. This is really fun to play with - there are 30+ tunable parameters and you can export your tree as a .glb file for import into tools like Blender or Unity.

# 8th June 2024, 9:43 pm / 3d, javascript

3D Gaussian Splatting—Why Graphics Will Never Be The Same (via) Gaussian splatting is an intriguing new approach to 3D computer graphics that’s getting a lot of buzz at the moment. This 2m11s YouTube video is the best condensed explanation I’ve seen of the key idea.

# 9th December 2023, 6:06 am / 3d, graphics

Write shaders for the Vegas sphere (via) Alexandre Devaux built this phenomenal three.js / WebGL demo, which displays a rotating flyover of the Vegas Sphere and lets you directly edit shader code to render your own animations on it and see what they would look like. The via Hacker News thread includes dozens of examples of scripts you can paste in.

# 1st December 2023, 6:45 pm / 3d, graphics

three.js examples: webgl_postprocessing_pixel (via) Neat new example for three.js that uses a pixel-shader postprocessor to apply an isometric pixel-art feel to a 3D scene.

# 1st December 2022, 9:57 pm / 3d, javascript, pixelart

Zdog (via) Well this is absolutely delightful: Zdog is a pseudo-3D engine for canvas and SVG that outputs 3D models rendered as super-stylish flat shapes. It’s hard to describe with words—go play with the demos!

# 28th May 2019, 9:59 pm / 3d, canvas

Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page. Spectacularly detailed exploration of the road graphics used in racing games prior to true 3D. This is a potential gold mine for anyone looking for a fun project to try out with canvas. Bonus points for comet integration—I’m still looking forward to the first real-time multiplayer game in the browser using comet and canvas.

# 8th February 2010, 11:21 am / graphics, comet, 3d, canvas, javascript, html5

Building Rome in a Day (via) “The first system capable of city-scale reconstruction from unstructured photo collections”—computer vision techniques used to construct 3D models of cities using 10s of thousands of photos from Flickr. Reminiscent of Microsoft PhotoSynth.

# 29th July 2009, 3:41 pm / photos, flickr, 3d, computer-vision, rome, photosynth, research

And Now For Something Entire... Oooh! Shiny! Alex Russell on O3D, the new 3D browser plugin from Google that makes OpenGL accessible to JavaScript (and embeds V8 so performance won’t suck even on slower browsers).

# 22nd April 2009, 12:19 pm / google, javascript, alex-russell, 3d, o3d, v8, opengl

Antisocial. Matt Westcott (a.k.a. Gasman) provides some technical background to his awesome Antisocial 3D canvas demo.

# 9th October 2008, 6:42 pm / javascript, canvas, 3d, demoscene, matt-westcott, gasman

Antisocial: a Javascript demo by Gasman. The demo is cool (3D on top of canvas); the “demotool” editor is simply amazing.

# 8th October 2008, 3 pm / demo, demotool, gasman, matt-westcott, antisocial, 3d, canvas, javascript

Johnny Chung Lee: Projects Wii. Awe-inspiring hardware hacks built on top of the Wiimote, including a dirt cheap interactive whiteboard and a head tracking system that turns a normal display in to a 3D VR environment.

# 23rd December 2007, 9:23 am / wiimote, wii, johnny-chung-lee, hardware-hacking, make, hardware, 3d, vr

Taking the canvas to another dimension. Opera have finally released a test version with support for a opera-3d canvas context—Windows only for the moment, but Mac and Linux versions are promised “soon”.

# 16th November 2007, 1:39 pm / opera, 3d, canvas, javascript

gSculpt. Powerful open source modelling software, written in Python and demonstrated (to much applause) as the last lightning talk of EuroPython 2007.

# 11th July 2007, 11:48 pm / python, 3d, modelling, open-source, europython, europython2007, gsculpt

Poly9 FreeEarth (via) Seriously sexy embedable 3D Flash globe, with a JavaScript API.

# 10th May 2007, 9:17 pm / javascript, flash, mapping, globe, 3d

Ajax3d Demo. Really impressive Virus clone, using the canvas element.

# 9th March 2007, 7 pm / canvas, ajax, 3d, ajax3d, javascript