Chapter 1, Creating Your First 3D Scene with Three.js, covers the basic steps you need to take to get started with Three.js. You'll immediately create your first Three.js scene and at the end of this chapter, you'll be able to create and animate your first 3D scene directly in your browser.

Chapter 2, Basic Components That Make Up a Three.js Scene, explains the basic components that you need to understand when working with Three.js. You'll learn about lights, meshes, geometries, materials, and cameras. In this chapter, you will also get an overview of the different lights Three.js provides and the cameras you can use in your scene.

Chapter 3, Working with the Different Light Sources Available in Three.js, dives deeper into the different lights you can use in your scene. It shows examples and explains how to use a spotlight, a direction light, an ambient light, a point light, a hemisphere light, and an area light. Additionally, it also shows how to apply a lens flare effect on your light source.

Chapter 4, Working with Three.js Materials, talks about the materials available in Three.js that you can use on your meshes. It shows all the properties you can set to configure the materials for your specific use and provides interactive examples to experiment with the materials that are available in Three.js.

Chapter 5, Learning to Work with Geometries, is the first of two chapters that explores all the geometries that are provided by Three.js. In this chapter, you'll learn how to create and configure geometries in Three.js and can experiment using the provided interactive examples with geometries (such as plane, circle, shape, cube, sphere, cylinder, torus, torusknot, and polyhedron).

Chapter 6, Advanced Geometries and Binary Operations, continues where Chapter 5, Learning to Work with Geometries, left off. It shows you how to configure and use the more advanced geometries provided by Three.js such as convex and lathe. In this chapter, you'll also learn how to extrude 3D geometries from 2D shapes, and how you can create new geometries by combining geometries using binary operations.

Chapter 7, Particles, Sprites, and the Point Cloud, explains how to use a point cloud from Three.js. You'll learn how to create a point cloud from scratch and from existing geometries. In this chapter, you'll also learn how you can modify the way the individual points look through the use of sprites and point cloud materials.

Chapter 8, Creating and Loading Advanced Meshes and Geometries, shows you how to import meshes and geometries from external sources. You'll learn how to use Three.js' internal JSON format to save geometries and scenes. This chapter also explains how to load models from formats such as OBJ, DAE, STL, CTM, PLY, and many more.

Chapter 9, Animations and Moving the Camera, explores the various types of animations you can use to make your scene come alive. You'll learn how to use the Tween.js library together with Three.js, and how to work with animation models based on morphs and skeletons.

Chapter 10, Loading and Working with Textures, expands on Chapter 4, Working with Three.js Materials, where materials were introduced. In this chapter, we dive into the details of textures. This chapter introduces the various types of textures that are available and how you can control how a texture is applied to your mesh. Additionally, in this chapter, you are shown how you can directly use the output from HTML5 video and canvas elements as input for your textures.

Chapter 11, Custom Shaders and Render Postprocessing, explores how you can use Three.js to apply postprocessing effects to your rendered scene. With postprocessing, you can apply effects such as blur, tiltshift, sepia, and so on, to your rendered scene. Besides this, you'll also learn how to create your own postprocessing effect and create a custom vertex and fragment shader.

Chapter 12, Adding Physics and Sounds to Your Scene, explains how you can add physics to your Three.js scene. With physics, you can detect collisions between objects, make them respond to gravity, and apply friction. This chapter shows you how to do this with the Physijs JavaScript library. Additionally, this chapter also shows you how you can add positional audio to a Three.js scene.

All you need for this book is a text editor (for example, Sublime) to play around with the examples and a modern web browser to access these examples. Some examples require a local web server, but you'll learn in Chapter 1, Creating Your First 3D Scene with Three.js, how to set up a very lightweight web server to use with the examples in this book.

This book is great for everyone who already knows JavaScript and wants to start with creating 3D graphics that run in any browser. You don't need to know anything about advanced math or WebGL; all that is needed is a general knowledge of JavaScript and HTML. The required materials and examples can be freely downloaded, and all tools used in this book are open source. So, if you ever want to learn how to create beautiful, interactive 3D graphics that run in any modern browser, this is the book for you.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles 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: "You can see in this code that besides setting the map property, we also set the bumpMap property to a texture."

A block of code is set as follows:

function createMesh(geom, imageFile, bump) {
  var texture = THREE.ImageUtils.loadTexture("../assets/textures/general/" + imageFile)
  var mat = new THREE.MeshPhongMaterial();
  mat.map = texture;
  var bump = THREE.ImageUtils.loadTexture("../assets/textures/general/" + bump)
  mat.bumpMap = bump;
  mat.bumpScale = 0.2;
  var mesh = new THREE.Mesh(geom, mat);
  return mesh;
}

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 effectFilm = new THREE.FilmPass(0.8, 0.325, 256, false);
effectFilm.renderToScreen = true;

var composer4 = new THREE.EffectComposer(webGLRenderer);
composer4.addPass(renderScene);
composer4.addPass(effectFilm);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# git clone https://github.com/josdirksen/learning-threejs

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You can do this by going to Preferences | Advanced and checking Show develop menu in menu bar."

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