This article is about merging geometry and how it can improve performance. It is important for perfomance to reduce the number of WebGL calls as much as possible. The rules of thumbs is the less data are exchanged between the cpu and the gpu, the better it is for performance.

The demo is rendering many cubes and put them randomly in the space. It is a simplictic way to measure the performance, but it will do for us. If the geometries arent merged, my computer is able to display 2000 cubes at 30fps. See on the left. But if the geometry are merged, it displays 120000 cubes at 30fps. See on the right. Screenshots make it pretty obvious :) This is 60 times more cubes!!!

So Let’s Merge Geometries

A geometry is the shape of the 3D object. three.js got already several predefined for you. plane, cube or sphere are the common ones. This post is about merging them, so lets do that. This line will merge otherGeometry into geometry .

1 THREE . GeometryUtils . merge ( geometry , otherGeometry );

THREE.GeometryUtils.merge() is in THREE.GeometryUtils with other geometry related functions. Btw it is more a concatenation than an actual merge them. No duplicate is removed in the process.

Combo: merging geometry with mesh

THREE.GeometryUtils.merge() supports to merge geometries with meshes too. In this case, the function will honor the mesh position/orientation. As a bonus, if your mesh uses THREE.MeshFaceMaterial , materials will be copied along. It is quite convenient when building a large geometry, or when optimising existing scenes with meshes.

1 2 3 4 var mesh = new THREE . Mesh ( new THREE . CubeGeometry ( 10 , 10 , 10 ), new THREE . MeshNormalMaterial ()); mesh . position . x = 30 ; mesh . rotation . y = Math . PI / 3 ; THREE . GeometryUtils . merge ( geometry , mesh );

This will merge a THREE.CubeGeometry with a translation of 30 on x and a rotation of Math.PI/3 on y . Simple enougth hey ? what about Limitations ?

When to use it ?

The answer is whenever possible due to the performance improvement. The merged geometry will act as a single atomic shape. So it is perfect with static geometry. But it may not be suitable in all cases. For example, it won’t be possible to move the merged objects independantly from each other. Or you can no more remove or add a object without recomputing the whole geometry.

Conclusion

So merging geometry reduces the amount of webgl calls, so dramatically improve performance (x60 time in our little demo). It is simple enougth to add to your demos or games when they have large static geometries. So use it as much as possible. That’s all folks. I hope it has been usefull :)