primitive

A primitive represents geometry in the Scene. The geometry can be from a single GeometryInstance as shown in example 1 below, or from an array of instances, even if the geometry is from different geometry types, e.g., an RectangleGeometry and an EllipsoidGeometry as shown in Code Example 2.

A primitive combines geometry instances with an Appearance that describes the full shading, including Material and RenderState. Roughly, the geometry instance defines the structure and placement, and the appearance defines the visual characteristics. Decoupling geometry and appearance allows us to mix and match most of them and add a new geometry or appearance independently of each other.

Combining multiple instances into one primitive is called batching, and significantly improves performance for static data. Instances can be individually picked; Scene#pick returns their GeometryInstance#id. Using per-instance appearances like PerInstanceColorAppearance, each instance can also have a unique color.

Geometry can either be created and batched on a web worker or the main thread. The first two examples show geometry that will be created on a web worker by using the descriptions of the geometry. The third example shows how to create the geometry on the main thread by explicitly calling the createGeometry method.