This is the personal blog of Ben Houston (bio here), a 3D computer graphics software developer. For a quick overview of the work I am proud of, see my portfolio. I've worked on projects like Web3DSurvey, Three.js, Deadline, Krakatoa, and Exocortex VFX plugins. I'm also an entrepreneur, having founded Land of Assets, Threekit, Clara.io, Exocortex, and Frantic Films Software.
Games do not agree on one way to compute bounced light and reflections. They pick a stack that fits the game. This is a proposal for two configurable slots in Three.js's WebGPURenderer: one for indirect diffuse, one for indirect specular, each an ordered list of sources that fall through by coverage.
Three.js already makes a single object look stunning. Indoor scenes are where it falls behind games. The fix is not new research: it is the lightmap, probe and screen-space reflection pipeline AAA games have shipped for a decade, adapted to the web. Here is the plan, and how far we have come.
Blue-noise textures make stochastic screen-space effects look good, but they cost megabytes to download or tens of seconds to generate. Houston Stratified Noise fills the same role with integer arithmetic in the shader: zero bytes, zero startup.
A small buffer, lots of samples, no banding: the usual deal is that you can't have all three. Jittering the sample weights lets you have your cake and eat it too.
An IES file captures the shape of a real light, but opening it gives you a wall of numbers. I built ies-tools to make seeing that light as easy as opening an image.
Your coding agent just rebuilt a library you could have installed. Now every future change has to pay for that decision.
Move the camera closer and the bumps get flatter: Three.js can change a material’s apparent depth without changing the material. The missing convention is simple—height needs a unit and a space.
A polished competitor isn't proof of a strong business. Lessons from Deadline, Clara.io, and Threekit on validating demand, assessing real threats, and pricing on value.
My AI-guided search for better blue noise began with a spectacular result that failed broader tests. The eventual sampler reduced filtered error by 10.7% in a Three.js reflection scene—but lost to FAST on rectangular-light shadows.
Your CLI already knows its commands and flags, yet its docs—and the agents using it—often have to reconstruct them. I built CliDoc to turn those same definitions into reference pages and a complete machine-readable description.
git-dedup is a drop-in replacement for git that shares one copy of Git history across all your clones, worktrees, and submodules. It made my agents start dramatically faster and cut my Git storage by 70%.
I built Vitest and Jest environments that give your tests real, GPU-backed WebGL and WebGPU contexts directly in Node.js. They use the same ANGLE and Dawn implementations as Chrome, so you get the same pixels without the overhead of launching a browser.
