Basic Animations

This tutorial will assume some React knowledge, and will be based on this starter codesandbox, so just fork it and follow along!

We will build a really small, continuous animation loop, that will be the basic building block of more advanced animations later on.

useFrame is a Fiber hook that lets you execute code on every frame of Fiber's render loop. This can have a lot of uses, but we will focus on building an animation with it.

It's important to remember that Fiber hooks can only be called inside a <Canvas /> parent!

import { useFrame } from '@react-three/fiber'

function MyAnimatedBox() {
  useFrame(() => {
    console.log("Hey, I'm executing every frame!")
  })
  return (
    <mesh>
      <boxGeometry />
      <meshBasicMaterial color="royalblue" />
    </mesh>
  )
}

This loop is the basic building block of our animation, the callback we pass to useFrame will be executed every frame and it will be passed an object containing the state of our Fiber scene:

For example, we can extract time information from the clock parameter, to know how much time has elapsed in our application, and use that time to animate a value:

useFrame(({ clock }) => {
  const a = clock.getElapsedTime()
  console.log(a) // the value will be 0 at scene initialization and grow each frame
})

clock is a three.js Clock object, from which we are getting the total elapsed time, which will be key for our animations.

It would be tempting to just update the state of our component via setState and let it change the mesh via props, but going through state isn't ideal, when dealing with continuous updates, commonly know as transient updates. Instead, we want to directly mutate our mesh each frame. First, we'll have to get a reference to it, via the useRef React hook:

import React from 'react'

function MyAnimatedBox() {
  const myMesh = React.useRef()
  return (
    <mesh ref={myMesh}>
      <boxGeometry />
      <meshBasicMaterial color="royalblue" />
    </mesh>
  )
}

myMesh will now hold a reference to the actual three.js object, which we can now freely mutate in useFrame, without having to worry about React:

useFrame(({ clock }) => {
  myMesh.current.rotation.x = clock.getElapsedTime()
})

Let's have a closer look:

• We are destructuring clock from the argument passed to useFrame, which we know is the state of our Fiber scene.
• We are accessing the rotation.x property of myMesh.current object, which is a reference to our mesh object
• We are assigning our time-dependent value a to the rotation on the x axis, meaning our object will now infinitely rotate between -1 and 1 radians around the x axis!

Exercises

• Try Math.sin(clock.getElapsedTime()) and see how your animation changes

Now that you understand the basic technique for animating in Fiber, learn how event works!

If you want to go deeper into animations, check these out:

• Animating with React Spring
• Animating with GSAP