Best WebGL framework to render million of elements

Question

I am new to webGL and want to get started with a project. I have engineering data which has lots of elements and points.

please Help me choose what is best framework for me.

1. Elements in millions
2. Rendering quality , shadows in not important nor focus
3. Could support defining solid elements or custom solid element types

If my requirement cant be met due to any limitations ,even then what can be my best choice ?

Answer 1

This question has yet been asked here. I let this answer because you also ask for a couple of details more.

Before considering a framework, the number of 'elements' you can display and the rendering quality are only hardware-limited.

1. Elements in millions

For the average audience, don't plan to render more than 1-2 million(s). See some potree examples where you can change the amount of points. For this quantity, the main available feature in GL is POINTS, that are sort of sprites, 2D planes facing the camera. You can draw anything you want on them but keep in mind they are not volumes. It is a native GL feature so you can implement it with or without any library.

2. Rendering quality

You may mean different aspects :

• framerate : this is the very first challenge of each webgl app, to keep the framerate at its highest (60 to 70FPS depending on screens). This mainly depends on the CPU-GPU computations you are asking.
• antialiasing : this is a native feature of the webgl API. But it uses a lot of resources and developpers use to disable it.
• higher-level rendering features can be implemented by professionnals but won't work on average devices without seriously reducing the framerate.

So regarding this list, if you don't set the antialiasing, your framerate is the only 'quality' parameter you will worry about. And it almost only depends on the CPU-GPU computations your program is asking. If you use a mature library it should barely not increase them.

3. Could support defining solid elements or custom solid element types

There comes the interest of using 'frameworks', which are initially javascript libraries, some of them looking like online 3D editors :

• Babylon.js and
• Three.js are the most known,

the latter being the most complete, actively supported, documented and used, as the docs, stackoverflow tag and github repository prove.

• For a quick setup (and more) with WebGL, online 3D editors like Clara.io let you discover it.