Book Image

Going the Distance with Babylon.js

By : Josh Elster
Book Image

Going the Distance with Babylon.js

By: Josh Elster

Overview of this book

Babylon.js allows anyone to effortlessly create and render 3D content in a web browser using the power of WebGL and JavaScript. 3D games and apps accessible via the web open numerous opportunities for both entertainment and profit. Developers working with Babylon.js will be able to put their knowledge to work with this guide to building a fully featured 3D game. The book provides a hands-on approach to implementation and associated methodologies that will have you up and running, and productive in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and links to fully working self-contained code snippets, you’ll start by learning about Babylon.js and the finished Space-Truckers game. You’ll also explore the development workflows involved in making the game. Focusing on a wide range of features in Babylon.js, you’ll iteratively add pieces of functionality and assets to the application being built. Once you’ve built out the basic game mechanics, you’ll learn how to bring the Space-Truckers environment to life with cut scenes, particle systems, animations, shadows, PBR materials, and more. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to structure your code, organize your workflow processes, and continuously deploy to a static website/PWA a game limited only by bandwidth and your imagination.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Building the Application
7
Part 2: Constructing the Game
13
Part 3: Going the Distance

Materials, Lighting, and the BRDF

The analogy of a 3D scene to a real-world movie studio set is an obvious but useful one. Some parts are obvious, such as the scene and stage, cameras, and lights, while others are not. Meshes are the actors and the set pieces, while materials are their costumes. This section is all about the costuming and lights, but it’s tough to discuss either without digging down a bit into the theoretical underpinnings of how light gets modeled in a scene.

This section is a bit of a doozy, so here’s a quick fly-over of what we’re going to talk about. First, we’re going to dabble with a little bit of symbolic mathematics and some extremely light calculus. Next, we’ll look at the different ways that light can reflect and interact with surfaces, and how it’s modeled or approximated in 3D. This will serve as a strong basis for us to learn about Materials and how they relate to math at a high level. After that, we will introduce...