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

Working with PBR Materials and IBL Scenes

StandardMaterial is very forgiving when it comes to being able to use various types of assets. It doesn’t mind if a texture is 8, 16, or 3 bits per pixel or JPEG, GIF, or PNG – it’ll paint a mesh with it. While this is also largely true for PBRMaterial in that it is a robust component and able to operate with a wide range of inputs, the rendered look of any PBRMaterial is far more sensitive to insufficient or improperly formatted texture data. We’re going to look at the specifics of what the Babylon.js PBR implementation expects, as well as the tools that will help create assets that fit those specifications. Later, we’ll go through the heuristics – a set of guidelines – of how to decide what and which assets and values to put into which properties to accomplish a particular look for your material. Let’s start by examining some of the ways to represent an image digitally.

Image Formats...