andersonanalytics / vanta

Plug & play animated 3D backgrounds for your website

Vanta JS

View demo gallery & customize effects at www.vantajs.com →

Add 3D animated digital art to any webpage with just a few lines of code.

What is Vanta? / FAQs

• Think of it as wrapper around a digital artwork that allows it to be inserted into an HTML element as a background.
• Effects can interact with mouse/touch inputs.
• Effect parameters (e.g. color) can be easily modified to match your brand.
• Effects are powered by three.js (using WebGL) or p5.js.
• Total additional filesize is ~120kb minified and gzipped (mostly three.js), which is smaller than comparable background images/videos.
• Vanta includes many pre-defined effects to try out. More effects will be added soon!

View demo gallery & customize effects at www.vantajs.com →

Basic usage:

<script src="three.min.js"></script>
<script src="vanta.waves.min.js"></script>
<script>
  VANTA.WAVES('#my-background')
</script>

View fiddle →

More options:

VANTA.WAVES({
  el: '#my-background', // element id or DOM object reference
  color: 0x000000,
  waveHeight: 20,
  shininess: 50,
  waveSpeed: 1.5,
  zoom: 0.75
})

Each effect has different parameters. Explore them all!

Cleanup:

var effect = VANTA.WAVES('#my-background')
effect.destroy() // e.g. call this in React's componentWillUnmount

Usage In React:

You can import vanta.xxxxx.min.js as follows. (Make sure three.js or p5.js is also included.)

  import * as THREE from './three.min.js'
  import BIRDS from './vanta.birds.min.js'

  class MyComponent extends React.Component {
    constructor() {
      super()
      this.myRef = React.createRef()
    }
    componentDidMount() {
      this.effect = BIRDS({
        el: this.myRef.current
      })
    }
    componentWillUnmount() {
      if (this.effect) this.effect.destroy()
    }
    render() {
      return <div ref={this.myRef}>
        Foreground content goes here
      </div>
    }
  }

Local Dev:

Clone the repo, run npm install and npm run dev, and go to localhost:8080.

Credits

• General inspiration from shadertoy.com, #generative, /r/generative, /r/creativecoding, etc

• Birds effect from https://threejs.org/examples/?q=birds#webgl_gpgpu_birds by @zz85

• Fog effect from https://thebookofshaders.com/13/ by @patriciogonzalezvivo

• Clouds effect from https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XslGRr by Inigo Quilez

• Clouds2 effect from https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lsBfDz by Rune Stubbe

• Trunk, Topology effects from http://generated.space/ by Kjetil Midtgarden Golid @kgolid