Can I Reuse or Learn from the Three.js Sketches on mrdoob.neocities.org?

Updated

You can learn from the sketches freely — they are publicly viewable and each one is a working example of what the Three.js Editor can produce. Reuse is a different question: the site itself states no license, so you should treat the code as "look and learn" rather than "copy and ship." If you want to build on a sketch, the safe path is to study the technique, then write your own version, or contact the creator for permission.

What the site actually is

The site is a personal gallery of sketches made with the Three.js Editor and uploaded to Neocities. The page describes it plainly: "Sketches done with Three.js Editor and uploaded to Neocities." That single sentence tells you two useful things:

  • The tool of origin is the Three.js Editor, a browser-based scene editor that ships with the Three.js project. Anything you see here was assembled in that editor rather than hand-written from scratch in a text editor.
  • Hosting is Neocities, a static-site host. That means each sketch is a static page — no server-side logic, no database, no build pipeline you need to reverse-engineer.

What you can learn from the sketches

Because the sketches come out of the Three.js Editor, they are unusually good study material for anyone learning that tool or Three.js generally:

  • Scene composition. How objects, lights, and cameras are arranged in a working scene.
  • Editor workflow. What a finished Editor project looks like when exported and published, which helps you understand the editor's output format.
  • Iteration over time. The sketches are numbered and dated, so you can see how the author's approach changed across a long span of work.

A practical way to study one: open a sketch, then open your browser's developer tools and inspect the loaded scripts and assets. You will see the geometry, materials, and animation logic that drive the scene. That is the same technique the site's own description implies — the sketches are there to be viewed.

The reuse question, honestly answered

Question Answer
Can I view the sketches? Yes — they are public pages.
Can I learn techniques from them? Yes — inspecting the code is a normal way to study Three.js.
Is there a stated license? No license is mentioned on the site.
Can I copy the code into my own project? Not safely without permission. No license means no granted reuse rights.
Can I rebuild a similar effect myself? Yes — reimplementing a technique in your own code is the clean route.

The distinction matters: learning from code and reusing code are legally and ethically different. Absent a license, the default is that the author retains rights. If a sketch does something you want in your own work, the reliable move is to understand the mechanism and write your own implementation, or reach out to the creator.

A concrete study workflow

If your goal is to learn rather than copy, this sequence works well:

  1. Pick a sketch that shows an effect you want to understand.
  2. Open developer tools and look at the network requests and loaded scripts to see what assets and libraries the page pulls in.
  3. Identify the core technique — is it a shader, a particle system, a particular material, a camera animation?
  4. Rebuild a minimal version yourself in the Three.js Editor or in plain Three.js code, changing one variable at a time until the effect matches.
  5. Note what you had to change to make it work in your own context — that gap is where the real learning is.

This turns each sketch into a lesson rather than a snippet to paste.

When reuse is the right call

Reuse makes sense when you have explicit permission — for example, if the creator states a license or grants you use directly. Until then, treat the sketches as a reference library: excellent for seeing what is possible with the Three.js Editor, and a legitimate starting point for your own experiments, but not a source of code to lift wholesale.