Building an Interactive 3D Experience with Three.js and React for Schildr

Hey Dev Community! 👋

I’ve been working on a project where I combined Three.js with React to create an interactive 3D experience. This is something I’m really excited to share, and I’d love to get some feedback and tips from all of you!

The Project: Schildr

The project is built for schildr.com, with a focus on the Configure Yourself section, where users can interact with 3D visualizations.

What is Schildr?

Schildr is a platform that lets you customize and configure products in a 3D space, and I had the chance to take part in building the 3D visualization component of the experience. The goal was to make the customization process not only functional but also visually engaging, and that’s where Three.js comes in.

The Tech Stack

• React: To build the front-end and handle state management.
• Three.js: For creating the 3D scenes, rendering, and adding interactive elements.
• React-Three-Fiber: A powerful React renderer for Three.js, which made the integration smooth and helped me manage 3D scenes directly within the React component tree.
• Styled Components: To handle the CSS styling for the React components.

Key Features

1. 3D Product Customization
   Users can interact with 3D models, rotate, zoom in/out, and customize various aspects of a product in real-time. It’s a super fun way to explore products, and React’s state management is perfect for handling all the changes on the fly.

2. Smooth Animations
   Thanks to Three.js, animations are buttery smooth. Whether it’s rotating objects or transitioning between different customization states, everything feels very interactive and dynamic.

3. Optimized for Performance
   I’ve optimized the scene so it’s lightweight and responsive, using techniques like lazy loading for assets and minimizing unnecessary re-renders in React.

Challenges & Solutions

Managing 3D Scene in React
One of the initial hurdles I faced was figuring out how to manage Three.js’s 3D scene within React’s declarative model. Using react-three-fiber helped a lot here, as it lets you write the 3D scene directly in JSX. It really makes the React and Three.js integration seamless.

Performance Tuning
Rendering 3D models can be performance-heavy, especially for mobile users. To address this, I made sure to use lower-poly models and added optimizations like object culling and efficient asset loading.

Why Three.js + React?

The combination of Three.js and React is incredibly powerful for building interactive and visually rich user interfaces. React provides a solid structure for managing the UI, while Three.js gives you the flexibility to create detailed and engaging 3D content. By using React-Three-Fiber, the two technologies work together like a charm, and the experience is super responsive.

Check It Out!

Feel free to explore the project at https://schildr.com and take a look at the Configure Yourself section for the full experience. If you have any suggestions or feedback, I’d love to hear it!