Learning Three.js – the JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL - Second Edition

Expanding your first scene with animations

If we want to animate the scene, the first thing that we need to do is find some way to re-render the scene at a specific interval. Before HTML5 and the related JavaScript APIs came along, the way to do this was using the setInterval(function,interval) function. With setInterval, we could specify a function that, for instance, would be called every 100 milliseconds. The problem with this function is that it doesn't take into account what is happening in the browser. If you were browsing another tab, this function would still be fired every couple of milliseconds. Besides that, setInterval isn't synchronized with the redrawing of the screen. This can lead to higher CPU usage and bad performance.

Introducing ...