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

Summary

This chapter may have felt either extremely long, extremely short, or extremely boring, depending on your existing knowledge and experience. The behavior of light in the real world is extremely complicated, so when simulating it in a scene, it’s necessary to make simplifications and assumptions about that behavior.

Traveling in rays from source to destination material, light is modeled using some implementation of the Bi-Directional Reflectance Function (BRDF). This function computes the (ir)radiance or brightness at a given input point and angle from a source of light. The function has a set of terms that are each calculated in separate functions, then combined to provide a result.

The Diffuse term (also called Albedo) accounts for light that has been evenly scattered from the surface of the material, kind of like how a point light evenly projects light in all directions. Specular is the term for light that is reflected from the material directly into the camera...