requestAnimationFrame is being called only once

Question

I'm trying to achieve a pretty basic animation using ThreeJS in my Ionic 2 application. Basically trying to rotate a cube. But the cube isn't rotating because requestAnimationFrame is being executed only once inside the render loop.

I'm able to see only this.

No rotating animation. I'm sharing my code below.

home.html

<ion-header>
  <ion-navbar>
    <ion-title>
      Ionic Blank
    </ion-title>
  </ion-navbar>
</ion-header>

<ion-content>
  <div #webgloutput></div>
</ion-content>

home.ts

import { Component, ViewChild, ElementRef } from '@angular/core';
import { NavController } from 'ionic-angular';

import * as THREE from 'three';


@Component({
  selector: 'page-home',
  templateUrl: 'home.html'
})
export class HomePage {
  @ViewChild('webgloutput') webgloutput: ElementRef;


  private renderer: any;
  private scene: any;
  private camera: any;
  private cube: any;

  constructor(public navCtrl: NavController) {
  }

  ngOnInit() {
    this.initThree();
  }

  initThree() {
    this.scene = new THREE.Scene();
    this.camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(75, window.innerWidth / window.innerHeight, 0.1, 1000);

    this.renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer();
    this.renderer.setSize( window.innerWidth, window.innerHeight );
    this.webgloutput.nativeElement.appendChild(this.renderer.domElement);

    let geometry = new THREE.BoxGeometry(1, 1, 1);

    let material = new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({ color: 0x00ff00});
    this.cube = new THREE.Mesh(geometry, material);
    this.scene.add(this.cube);
    this.camera.position.z = 5;

    this.render();
  }


  render() {
    console.log("render called");
    requestAnimationFrame(() => this.render);

    this.cube.rotation.x += 0.5;
    this.cube.rotation.y += 0.5;
    this.renderer.render(this.scene, this.camera);
  }

}

Answer 1

The purpose of requestAnimationFrame is not to do animations, its purpose is to call the function provided on the next frame so basically we are calling the same function on each frame.

requestAnimationFrame(justNameofFun);

i.e.

const clock = new THREE.Clock();
const tick = () => {
  const elapsedTime = clock.getElapsedTime()
  cube1.rotation.y = elapsedTime * Math.PI * 1;
  renderer.render(scene, camera);
  window.requestAnimationFrame(tick);
};

// Call at least once to perform requestanimationframe

tick();