Low-poly palms for three.js — GLB models with LODs

Palms in Low-poly Style for three.js

Low-poly palms drop into a three.js scene with almost no setup: load the GLB through GLTFLoader from three/addons, then hand the LOD0–LOD3 meshes to THREE.LOD with lod.addLevel(mesh, distance) so each palm swaps detail by camera distance. Because the faceted look uses flat shading and vertex colours (COLOR_0) instead of textures, one shared material covers the whole beach, and the solid leaf geometry avoids alpha-tested overdraw on mobile GPUs.

The five palms here — Coconut Palm, Date Palm, Canary Palm, Washingtonia and Fan Palm — stay within a few hundred to a couple thousand triangles at LOD0, with the pivot at the base for easy placement and an invisible collision mesh you can pass to Rapier or cannon-es. Line an island with InstancedMesh, or vary a treeline with BatchedMesh and a new seed.

About the Low-poly style

Low-poly vegetation is the cheapest style to render and to ship.

Flat shading: one normal per face gives the crisp faceted look; no normal maps.
Colour lives in vertex colours (glTF COLOR_0), so there are no textures, no UV work and almost no video memory.
Leaves are solid geometry, not alpha cards: no alpha testing and no transparent overdraw, which matters on mobile GPUs.
One material can be shared by every model in the scene, so trees batch and instance easily.
Typical budgets range from a few hundred to a couple of thousand triangles at LOD0.

A good fit for mobile, WebGL/WebGPU, VR, strategy, city builders and stylised indie games. In the engine, use a material that multiplies by vertex colour.

Using it in three.js

In three.js, load GLB with GLTFLoader from three/addons; add DRACOLoader or KTX2Loader only if a file uses those extensions.

Distance LOD: THREE.LOD with lod.addLevel(mesh, distance) for LOD0–LOD3; it switches levels by camera distance every frame.
Forests: InstancedMesh draws thousands of copies in one draw call, and BatchedMesh mixes several tree variations. THREE.LOD does not apply per instance, so group instances by LOD per chunk yourself.
Leaves: glTF alphaMode MASK becomes material.alphaTest, and double-sided materials get side: THREE.DoubleSide automatically.
Collision mesh: keep it invisible and pass it to a physics library such as Rapier or cannon-es.