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)

Assigning One Color per Object in the Scene

To keep things simple, we will pick an object based on its primitive color. That is, we discard the shiny reflections or shadows, and render the object with its uniform color. This is important, because to pick an object based on a color, we need to make sure that the color is constant per object and that each object has a different unique color.

We achieve constant coloring by telling the fragment shader to use only the material diffuse property to set the ESSL output color variable. We are assuming that each object has a unique diffuse property.

In situations where objects may share the same diffuse color, we can create a new ESSL uniform to store the picking color and make it unique for every object that's rendered into the offscreen framebuffer. This way, the objects will look the same when they are rendered on the screen, but...