Ben Houston's Blog

Ben is currently available for contract work for 3D & web solutions — reach out.

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.

Latest writing, page 5

June 1, 2026
React Prerequisites
Part of the React Internals Series
Calling a component, updating the DOM, and painting pixels are three different events. Keeping them separate explains why React requires pure renders—and why choosing between useEffect and useLayoutEffect affects what users see.
May 15, 2026
node-prewarm: CLI for Node 25's Compile Cache
New in Node 25 is the node compile cache, which can deliver a 20% to 30% boost in server start-up time. I built `node-prewarm` to make that practical on real projects with minimal changes.
May 1, 2026
Transferable Pixel-Perfect Material Graphs for Blender & Three.js
A MaterialX file can load in both Blender and Three.js and still look wrong. Matching the reference meant chasing inverted logic, flipped coordinates, and noise functions where 'close enough' creates an entirely different pattern.
April 24, 2026
MaterialX Needs a Single-File Container
MaterialX assets are multiple loose files, which breaks down in online, and collaborative contexts. The community has already solved this with zip packaging. We just need to formalize it as .mtlz.
April 14, 2026
Launching Land of Assets
AI product imagery can lose the details that make a sofa yours. After a decade at Threekit, I built Land of Assets around a shared source of real geometry and materials for configurators and AI imagery.
March 26, 2026
Passwordless Login System
Passwords are a shared-secret liability. Here is how to build a modern passwordless auth flow using Email OTP and Passkeys (WebAuthn), without storing passwords.
March 17, 2026
Clean GA4 for TanStack Router
AI-generated GA4 integrations kept looking plausible and failing in production. I built tanstack-router-ga4 to handle route tracking, initialization, and per-stream configuration in a small, typed component for TanStack Router and Start.
February 20, 2026
Zstdify: Pure TypeScript Zstd
Today, I built a pure-TypeScript Zstandard implementation (library + CLI + dictionary training + interop tests) in just 4 hours using OpenAI Codex 5.3.
February 19, 2026
Overview of Behavior Graphs
When a visual scripting system forces every complex interaction back into custom code, its simplicity has become a ceiling. That frustration led me to build behave-graph and push for portable interactivity in glTF.
February 19, 2026
Why Land of Assets Standardizes on glTF
A 3D asset can preserve every proprietary feature and still look different in another tool. That tradeoff is why Land of Assets chose glTF over USD for its Master Assets.
February 2, 2026
Why I Built Land of Assets
Managing 3D assets shouldn't feel harder than writing the application. After building enterprise 3D infrastructure, I built Land of Assets for developers whose models have outgrown Git but whose teams don't need an enterprise platform.
January 20, 2026
Stopped Creating package.json Scripts
I stopped wrapping every CLI command in package.json scripts—then a contributor assumed my project had no tests. That experience changed where I draw the line between useful discovery and an abstraction that hides the tool.