Book Image

Real-Time 3D Graphics with WebGL 2 - Second Edition

By : Farhad Ghayour, Diego Cantor
5 (1)
Book Image

Real-Time 3D Graphics with WebGL 2 - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Farhad Ghayour, Diego Cantor

Overview of this book

As highly interactive applications have become an increasingly important part of the user experience, WebGL is a unique and cutting-edge technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the web. Packed with 80+ examples, this book guides readers through the landscape of real-time computer graphics using WebGL 2. Each chapter covers foundational concepts in 3D graphics programming with various implementations. Topics are always associated with exercises for a hands-on approach to learning. This book presents a clear roadmap to learning real-time 3D computer graphics with WebGL 2. Each chapter starts with a summary of the learning goals for the chapter, followed by a detailed description of each topic. The book offers example-rich, up-to-date introductions to a wide range of essential 3D computer graphics topics, including rendering, colors, textures, transformations, framebuffers, lights, surfaces, blending, geometry construction, advanced techniques, and more. With each chapter, you will "level up" your 3D graphics programming skills. This book will become your trustworthy companion in developing highly interactive 3D web applications with WebGL and JavaScript.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

WebGL Does Not Have Cameras

How is it that there are no cameras in a 3D computer-graphics technology? Well, let's rephrase this: WebGL does not have a camera object that you can manipulate. However, we can assume that what we render in the canvas is what our camera captures. In this chapter, we are going to solve the problem of how to represent a camera in WebGL. The short answer is that we need 4x4 matrices.

Every time we move our camera around, we will need to update the objects according to the new camera position. To do this, we need to systematically process each vertex and apply a transformation that produces the new viewing position. Similarly, we need to make sure that the object normals and light directions are still consistent after the camera has moved. In summary, we need to analyze two different types of transformations: vertex (points) and normal (vectors).

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