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.
A small multiresolution feature grid plus a tiny MLP decoder that replaces a stack of correlated PBR textures with one compact, GPU-decoded representation. Named channels with their own activation functions, built on new fp16/half-precision support in TSL, and demonstrated on a MeshPhysicalNodeMaterial. The format is material-agnostic.
How Three.js now validates individual TSL shader expressions on WebGPU and WebGL2, with numeric diagnostics, deterministic input sampling, and support for vectors and matrices.
A short reference on the neural-network vocabulary used across the neural texture, neural material and neural appearance posts — MLP, weights and biases, ReLU, forward pass, loss, gradient descent, backpropagation, Adam, latent vectors, feature grids and decoder networks — explained once, concretely, so those posts can link here instead of re-deriving it.
How I added Gaussian Splatting to Three.js with WebGPU, TSL, a reusable GPU counting sort, SPZ v3/v4 and interoperability loaders, and SH1-SH3 view-dependent color.
The architecture behind Web3DSurvey, two Cloud Run services, a partitioned BigQuery store, and a transparent JSON cache that let me report real-world WebGL and WebGPU support for a few dollars a month.
How I built real-time 3D rendering on a slow 486 with only 256 colors in VGA Mode 13h, using fixed-point math, palette quantization, matcap-style Phong lighting, and x86 assembly.
React Native is an excellent development platform again. Here is what changed since AirBNB moved off of it in 2018, how its New Architecture works, and where the Expo framework fits in.
Many founders believe they are running a SaaS company when they are running a consulting company with good internal tools. If your team uses the platform to deliver work for clients who never log in, you are the latter, and that changes how you should hire, price, and focus.
Web 3D Survey v2 rebuilds the site on TanStack Start, adds homepage support summaries, WGSL and adapter reporting, browser capability stats, and a live /machine report.
I spent ten years building fluid simulation tools for VFX: a three-day Stable Fluids prototype, sparse level sets for Scooby-Doo 2, tetrahedral and vortex solvers at Exocortex, and three pieces of my software on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Why SaaS products that stretch one opinionated framework across multiple markets often become harder to use, and why scalable multi-market products separate universal toolkit primitives from market-specific frameworks.
My dad bought an Apple IIe and a stack of Nibble Magazines. This was the start of my career in computer graphics.
