Ben Houston

Excited to share Land of Assets, a new project I've created: landofassets.com It's 3D asset infrastructure designed for developers working with glTF. Think GitHub for your 3D models: versioning, CDN delivery, and a typed SDK. Free for public assets. Looking for initial testers now.

Today's #ThreeJS PR: High accuracy, spatio-temporal de-noised 1 ray/pixel Screen Space Reflections (SSR) re-write @ 60 FPS + coverage output. github.com/mrdoob/three...

Another #ThreeJS PR for today: Specular Occlusion ("GTSO") via GTAO. Improved it slightly to avoid dark outlines on objects. github.com/mrdoob/three...

Today's #ThreeJS PR - Specular Reflection Probes - For fast specular reflections on low end devices. Per pixel, box-projected, and build on WebGPU's cube-array textures. github.com/mrdoob/three...

Today's #ThreeJS PR: Added true native 16-bit linear float HDR loading using browser-based Jpeg XL decoding, float16 Canvas and globalHDRheadroom features. github.com/mrdoob/three...

Today's ThreeJS contribution: Real-time oriented UV unwrapped for ThreeJS native meshes and scenes. 10x smaller and 3x faster than xAtlas on average. github.com/mrdoob/three...

Adding support for priority-based loading to ThreeJS's FileLoader - prioritize your main assets first { priority: 'high' }, load LODs and background elements later { priority: 'low' } github.com/mrdoob/three...

Lots of new features in WebGPU developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-... - WGSL @depth to keep early-Z - Unaligned compressed texture thanks to @castano.mastodon.gamedev.place.ap.brid.gy - Bindless blog and demo from @toji.dev - srgb/display-p3-linear colorspaces - snorm10-10-10-2 vertex format

Global Illumination Light Probes in @ThreeJS is now 4x faster to calculate and more accurate. The calculation was CPU-bound, so I used an ArrayCamera to bulk render probes, and I integrate their results fully, rather than just 512 samples. github.com/mrdoob/three...

New project: Fidelity test suite for @gkjohnson.bsky.social's three-gpu-pathtracer vs @blender.org . Compares both the legacy #WebGL and new #WebGPU renderers. bhouston.github.io/three-gpu-pa... github.com/bhouston/thr...

OpenDLSS 5 comes to ThreeJS. NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 neural rendering network, as @threejs compute nodes, byte for byte. github.com/bhouston/thr...

"git-dedup" - a Git wrapper that makes git faster and smaller for agentic workflows. Specifically checkouts and submodules can be slow if you have agent fleets on the go. This fixes that: ben3d.ca/blog/git-ded...

I love my MacBook Air 95% of the time except when I have to do a bunch of Blender renders. It throttles down since it is at 100% sustained usage and becomes ultra slow.

Want to inspect #MaterialX materials in your coding IDE? Try my new #ThreeJS-based MaterialX Viewer extension for VSCode and Cursor: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa... open-vsx.org/extension/be...

2.4x Faster Native GPU Testing for @vitest.dev and #jest without a Browser. Thanks to Renaud Rohlinger for the inspiration (and this is partially built on his node-webgl package.) ben3d.ca/blog/native-...

Want to write simpler & faster tests your #WebGPU or #WebGL code in @vitest.dev? I've created two Vitest environments just for you! github.com/bhouston/vit...

I want developers to be able to write performant #WebGPU code. To do that, they need to know what different operations, code patterns, and optional features actually cost on the devices people use. ben3d.ca/blog/introdu...

Neural Texture Compression (NTC) for #ThreeJS. NTC shrinks material sizes by 90% by compressing all textures together into a single compact neural network. This is also the first open-source NTC implementation. Trainer + #ThreeJS runtime library here: three-ntc.ben3d.ca

Web3D Survey's new GPU benchmarking page now has a sharable results URL. Here is mine: web3dsurvey.com/benchmark/40...

Finally you can get some solid numbers on #WebGPU performance. Web3D Survey gets a statistically sound benchmark: web3dsurvey.com/benchmark Aggregation numbers coming soon. How do you measure up?

Ant Colonies in the Machine Communicating swarms of small LLM agents will become as omnipresent in our digital environment as ant colonies are in our biological one. ben3d.ca/blog/ant-col...

Introducing "Three-LLM" A #WebGPU LLM inference engine build upon #ThreeJS's compute / TSL (thanks sunag!) that directly loads Hugging Face models, including Qwen, Phi, Smol & GPT2. three-llm.ben3d.ca

Added physically-based Location + Date Time aware sun positioning to mrdoob's new #ThreeJS sunlight. Much easier to simulate day/night cycles than trying to figure out how to move the sun via manual azimuth/elevation modification. github.com/mrdoob/three...

New #ThreeJS PR: A #WebGPU-native 2D Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) helper via the Stockham algorithm. Full details here, including an interactive convolution example: github.com/mrdoob/three...

From @ben3d.ca: ben3d.ca/blog/m5-max-...

Today, I added support for Niantic Spatial, Inc.'s SPZ V4 this morning to #ThreeJS's gaussian splatting #gs3d implementation. Reduces file size 30% and 1.5x faster loading. github.com/mrdoob/three...

Just added view dependent rendering of Gaussian Splats via Spherical Harmonics (up to SH3) to #ThreeJS in this PR: github.com/mrdoob/three... #gs3d

Been following reddit.com/r/aivideo for the last year or two and the quality of videos being posted their has dramatically increased the last 6 months. Blow my mind what one person can do now.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

How Web 3D Survey handles 300M data points / month while running on a budget of $3 CDN / month: ben3d.ca/blog/reporti...

Who doesn’t love software rendering? Great post from Ben Houston with some source code included!

Rendering Real-Time 3D Before GPUs How I built a real-time 3D renderer on a slow 486 with only 256 colors, using fixed-point math, palette quantization, matcap-style Phong lighting, and x86 assembly. ben3d.ca/blog/renderi...

Today's Essay: Are you a SaaS Platform or a Consulting Shop with good internal tools? It can be easy to confuse the two when you are a new entrepreneur but it matters which one you are if you want to scale and pitch to investors. ben3d.ca/blog/consult...

Web3D Survey hits 2.0: The #webgpu features/limits tracker website now lists (1) WSGL language features, (2) vendor/arch breakdown, (3) browser color space support, and (4) lets you see your own machine capabilities. Details: ben3d.ca/blog/web-3d-...

Wrote a minimal, extensible Gaussian Splat renderer PR for @ThreeJS using TSL for sorting, vertex processing and fragment shading + instances. It separates the GS3D data structure from the loader and from the renderer. github.com/mrdoob/three...

Updated web3dsurvey.com, the WebGL, WebGL2 and WebGPU extension and feature tracker with a more informative homepage and added some new browser statistics.

Quick little PR to @ThreeJS to add support for retroreflective materials via the Minimal Retroreflective Microfacet Model. github.com/mrdoob/three...

How to optimizing @tanstack.com Start for Google Cloud Run: (1) config Nitro to bundle server files, (2) prewarm NODE_COMPILE_CACHE during docker build. Full details: ben3d.ca/blog/optimiz...

Proof of Possession: How to solve rampant developer token thief: ben3d.ca/blog/proof-o...

My painting of Ghibli-style dust gremlins for our 3 year old who loves Totoro. Simple but she thinks having them looking over her at night is “awesome!”

Today's side project is "node-prewarm" - it is a simple CLI tool for pre-populating your NODE_COMPILE_CACHE (available with @nodejs 25.4 and later) so your services startup 20% faster: ben3d.ca/blog/introdu...

Last week I worked on achieving pixel-perfect #ThreeJS import of @materialx.bsky.social files, and this week I've got pixel perfect @blender.org #MaterialX importing working. ben3d.ca/blog/pixel-p...

Preparing a major PR to improve #ThreeJS MaterialX support significantly. In order to perfect it, I've written an open source @materialx.bsky.social Fidelity Suite inspired by the @khronos.org / @gltf.bsky.social fidelity tool: material-fidelity.ben3d.ca

MaterialX Needs a Single-File Container. Let's formalize what @polyhaven.com and @gpuopen.bsky.social material libraries are already doing with a new "mtlz" extension. Details here: ben3d.ca/blog/materia... CC: @materialx.bsky.social