Simple Car Implementation with three.js: Grouping, Camera Follow, Controls, Wheel Rotation, and Parking Feature
This article demonstrates how to create a simple car model in three.js, grouping its components, implementing a following camera, adding keyboard controls for movement and steering, animating wheel rotation, and building an interactive parking feature with raycasting for selection.
The guide shows how to build a lightweight car model in three.js as an alternative to heavier pre‑built models, starting with the creation of the vehicle body, edges, and grouping them into a single THREE.Group for easier manipulation.
Vehicle geometry and material are defined using THREE.BoxGeometry and THREE.MeshBasicMaterial , then added to the scene along with an edge line for visual framing.
A following camera is set up with THREE.PerspectiveCamera and updated each frame so that its position tracks the car’s position, providing a smoother viewing experience.
Keyboard listeners record pressed keys and elapsed time, enabling forward/backward movement and left/right steering by adjusting the car’s position and rotation based on trigonometric calculations.
Wheel objects are created as THREE.CylinderGeometry meshes; during animation their rotation is synchronized with the car’s heading to simulate realistic wheel turning.
Parking spaces are represented by THREE.PlaneGeometry meshes placed on the ground, each tagged with a custom userData.type = "parkingSpace" for later identification.
Click handling uses a THREE.Raycaster that projects the mouse position into the scene, highlights the selected parking space, and can trigger automatic car movement toward the chosen spot (the actual path‑finding logic is left for future enhancement).
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