Chapter 1, Getting Started, covers the basic recipes that you can use when you create new Three.js-based applications. We'll show you how you can set up a basic Three.js skeleton using any of the available Three.js renderers. We'll further show you WebGL detection, loading resources, setting up an animation loop, adding drag and drop support, and controlling your scene through the keyboard.

Chapter 2, Geometries and Meshes, shows you a number of recipes that focus on creating, working with and manipulating geometries and meshes. We'll go into detail on how to rotate meshes in different ways, manipulate them using matrix transformations, generate geometries programmatically, and load models from Blender and in other formats.

Chapter 3, Working with the Camera, focuses on recipes that manipulate the cameras available in Three.js. It shows you how to work with the perspective and the orthogonal camera. This chapter also shows you recipes that explain how to rotate a camera, center a camera, and follow objects around.

Chapter 4, Materials and Textures, contains recipes that explain how to get good results working with the materials provided by Three.js. It has recipes on transparency, reflections, UV mapping, face materials, bump and normal maps and also explains how the various blend modes work.

Chapter 5, Lights and Custom Shaders, has recipes that deal with the workings of the different light sources in Three.js and shows you how to work with WebGL shaders. It shows you how to correctly set up shadows, create a sun-like lighting source, and goes into the differences between spot lights, point lights, and directional lights. In this chapter, we'll also provide you with a couple of recipes that explain how to create a custom vertex shader and a custom fragment shader.

Chapter 6, Point Clouds and Postprocessing, provides you with recipes that show you how to set up postprocessing. With postprocessing, you can enhance your scene with blurring, coloring, or other types of effects. This chapter also contains recipes that explain features of a particle system, such as animation and particle materials.

Chapter 7, Animation and Physics, shows you a number of recipes that help you in animating the objects in your scene and show you how to add physics (such as gravity and collision detection) to your scene.

The only thing that you need for this book is a simple text editor to experiment with the provided recipes and a modern web browser to run the examples. For some of the advanced recipes, it is preferred to have a locally installed web server or disable some security settings in your browser. In Chapter 1, Getting Started, recipes are provided that explain how to set up such a server and disable the relevant security settings.

This book is for everyone who has a basic understanding of JavaScript and Three.js but wants to learn how to use more advanced features of Three.js You don't need to understand advanced math concepts or have in depth knowledge of WebGL. The recipes in this book will explain the various features of Three.js step-by-step and we also provide all the recipes as ready to use HTML sources.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: " One interesting thing to note is the addition of texture.needsUpdate = true to the ondrop event handler."

A block of code is set as follows:

step1(function (value1) {
  step2(value1, function(value2) {
    step3(value2, function(value3) {
      step4(value3, function(value4) {
        // Do something with value4
      });
    });
  });
});

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

    var y = camera.position.y;
    camera.position.y = y * Math.cos(control.rotSpeed) +z * Math.sin(control.rotSpeed);
    camera.position.z = z * Math.cos(control.rotSpeed) –y * Math.sin(control.rotSpeed);

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On this screen, just click on the I'll be careful, I promise! button."

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To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title through the subject of your message.

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