SkyBox

A self contained class for drawing a skybox. This feature now exists in three.js (Scene.background) but uses matrices to compute the camera. This one has a slightly different approach, since the cameraPosition is available in shaders as a uniform by default, we can avoid some computation that happens with the backgroundBoxCamera in THREE.WebGLRenderer.

The shader here does one addition and 2 matrix multiplications:

vec4 wp = vec4( position + cameraPosition , 1. ); 

vViewDir = position; //no normalization

gl_Position = projectionMatrix * viewMatrix * wp;

It probably doesnt really affect anything since the cube has a few vertices, but it saves one multiplication and the normalization at the cost of one addition ( the original has 3 multiplications and a normalization ).

Where it could provide some performance saving is by removing the need for the Scene.background logic. There is no need to copy the properties into a different camera, and no need to obtain the mvp matrix since it already cuts on one multiplication in the shader:

backgroundBoxCamera.projectionMatrix.copy( camera.projectionMatrix ); //no need to copy

backgroundBoxCamera.matrixWorld.extractRotation( camera.matrixWorld ); //these are somewhat expensive operations
backgroundBoxCamera.matrixWorldInverse.getInverse( backgroundBoxCamera.matrixWorld );
backgroundBoxMesh.modelViewMatrix.multiplyMatrices( backgroundBoxCamera.matrixWorldInverse, backgroundBoxMesh.matrixWorld );

Constructor

• SkyBox( renderer:[ THREE.WebGLRenderer ] , (opt) cubemap:[ THREE.TextureCube ] )

  The renderer is required for construction, the cubemap can be assigned later.

Properties

• cubemap:[ THREE.TextureCube ]

  the cubemap currently assigned to the skybox

Methods

• void render( camera:[THREE.Camera] )

  renders the skybox to the window frame buffer, call it before rendering the main scene

Install

$ npm install three-skybox

Usage

var SkyBox = require('three-skybox')(THREE);

var skybox = new SkyBox( renderer , myTextureCube );


function render(){

	skybox.render( camera );

	renderer.render( scene , camera )

}