How the Three.js Sketches on mrdoob.neocities.org Are Created and Hosted

The sketches on mrdoob.neocities.org are built with the Three.js Editor — a browser-based tool for assembling 3D scenes — and then uploaded to Neocities, a static site host. The site itself describes them plainly as "Sketches done with Three.js Editor and uploaded to Neocities." Because both halves of that workflow run entirely in the browser and produce static files, no server-side code is involved: each sketch is just HTML, JavaScript, and assets served as-is.

What the site actually is

It is a dated archive of numbered experiments, not a tutorial site or a product. The listing runs from 001 ~ 15 11 11 up to 039 ~ 21 03 17, where the number is the sketch index and the date is when it was posted (year-month-day). The cadence is uneven — several sketches in November 2015, a long gap, then a cluster in early 2020 — which is consistent with a personal sketchbook rather than a scheduled release.

How a sketch gets made

The Three.js Editor is the authoring step. In general terms, that tool lets you:

• Add and position objects (meshes, lights, cameras) in a 3D viewport.
• Adjust materials, geometry, and transforms through a properties panel.
• Attach scripts to objects for animation or interaction.
• Export the scene as a self-contained page that loads Three.js and rebuilds the scene in the browser.

The key point is that the editor outputs a static bundle. Whatever you see on the site is the result of that export, not a live editing session.

How it gets hosted

Neocities serves static files, so the hosting step is a file upload rather than a deployment pipeline:

1. Export the scene from the Three.js Editor.
2. Upload the resulting HTML/JS (and any assets) to the Neocities site.
3. Link each sketch from the index page.

There is no backend to configure, no database, and no build server. The browser downloads the page, Three.js runs client-side, and the scene renders. That is why the whole collection can live on a free static host.

Why this pairing works

The two tools match because neither expects a server. The editor produces exactly the kind of artifact Neocities is built to serve.

What you can and can't conclude

You can reasonably say the sketches are hand-built scenes exported from the editor and published as static pages. What the site does not state is the license, the source files, or whether each sketch is individually downloadable — so treat those as unknown rather than assuming they are open or reusable. If you want to study the technique, the practical route is to open a sketch, view its page source, and see how the exported scene is structured; that reflects the editor's output format rather than any hidden build step.