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)

Using Texture Coordinates

Before we apply our texture to our surface, we need to figure out which part of the texture maps onto which part of the surface. We do this through another vertex attribute known as texture coordinates.

Texture coordinates are two-element float vectors that describe a location on the texture that coincides with that vertex. You may think that it would be most natural to have this vector be an actual pixel location on the image; instead, WebGL forces all of the texture coordinates into a 0 to 1 range, where (0, 0) represents the top left-hand side corner of the texture and (1, 1) represents the bottom right-hand side corner, as shown in the following image:

This means that, in order to map a vertex to the center of any texture, you would give it a texture coordinate of (0.5, 0.5). This coordinate system holds true even for rectangular textures.

This may...