Hi Michael, and welcome to the forums.
Wondering if verge is doing anything under the hood to improve performance of threejs?
We improve performance from time to time, although we do it mostly with the additional code we wrote on top of Three.js. The library itself is being actively developed by the open source community with feature updates and performance improvements coming out regularly.
Is it possible to get a Material class for the Gold material say, to apply directly with threejs?
Verge3D materials from the pack heavily rely on Blender nodes that are not supported by Three.js. In addition, the pure glTF 2.0 format supports only a basic PBR scheme so we had to introduce S8S extensions to be able to transfer advanced material information. Those extensions are not recognized by the glTF loader of Three.js either.
So I guess if you want to use our Essential material pack and the upcoming Jewelry material pack you might want to stick to Verge3D.
.
