A step-by-step breakdown of how I built a Three.js visual explainer on dithering by animating 160,000 cubes with custom shaders.

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A detailed step-by-step walkthrough of building a Three.js visualization that animates 160,000 cubes to explain how image dithering works. The tutorial covers setting up an InstancedMesh with custom GLSL vertex and fragment shaders, passing per-instance data via InstancedBufferAttribute, animating z-position and scale with smoothstep, implementing per-cube animation delays using normalized cell/row/column indices, loading image textures sampled by grid position, and applying Bayer matrix and halftone threshold maps to produce dithering effects. Tweakpane is used for interactive controls. The key insight is offloading all 480,000 per-frame property calculations to the GPU via uniforms and shader defines rather than CPU loops.

Animating 160,000 Cubes in Three.js to Visualize Dithering