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)

The Camera Matrix

Let's say, for a moment, that we do have a camera in WebGL. A camera should be able to rotate and translate to explore this 3D world. As we saw in the previous section, a 4x4 matrix can encode rotations and translations. Therefore, you should use one such matrix to represent our hypothetical camera.

Let's assume that our camera is located at the origin of the world and that it's oriented so that it's looking toward the negative z-axis direction. This is a good starting point; we already know what transformation represents such a configuration in WebGL (Identity matrix of rank four).

For the sake of analysis, let's break the problem down into two subproblems: camera-translation and camera-rotation. We will have a practical demo for each one.

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