WebGL lab: 3D experiments with React Three Fiber and Blender

What this is

A personal, ongoing lab rather than client work. I use it to explore the 3D web stack: Three.js, React Three Fiber and Blender, with the goal of understanding what it actually takes to ship an ambitious WebGL experience that still loads fast.

This project is deliberately secondary on this site. My work is building products; this is where I sharpen the visual end of that craft.

Why bother

The interesting engineering problems in WebGL are the unglamorous ones:

• Asset pipeline: modelling in Blender, exporting to glTF, compressing geometry and textures so a scene doesn't cost megabytes
• Performance budgets: draw calls, geometry instancing and knowing what the GPU is actually doing, especially on mobile
• Integration: making a 3D scene coexist with a normal, accessible, fast-loading page instead of taking it hostage

The same discipline that makes a dashboard fast makes a 3D scene fast; the tools change, the mindset doesn't.

Current state

Honestly: early. The current prototype is a Vite + React Three Fiber setup with custom Blender assets, used to learn the modelling-to-web pipeline end to end.

[TODO: publish the live experiment and link it here when it is presentable.]

Where it feeds back into client work

Exploring rendering performance at this level pays off directly in product work. The profiling habits, the respect for frame budgets and the eye for motion detail all transfer to the gPulse dashboards and everyday frontend engineering.