Book Image

WebGL Beginner's Guide

Book Image

WebGL Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

WebGL is a new web technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without installing additional software. As WebGL is based on OpenGL and brings in a new concept of 3D graphics programming to web development, it may seem unfamiliar to even experienced Web developers.Packed with many examples, this book shows how WebGL can be easy to learn despite its unfriendly appearance. Each chapter addresses one of the important aspects of 3D graphics programming and presents different alternatives for its implementation. The topics are always associated with exercises that will allow the reader to put the concepts to the test in an immediate manner.WebGL Beginner's Guide presents a clear road map to learning WebGL. 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 WebGL topics, including drawing, color, texture, transformations, framebuffers, light, surfaces, geometry, and more. With each chapter, you will "level up"ù your 3D graphics programming skills. This book will become your trustworthy companion filled with the information required to develop cool-looking 3D web applications with WebGL and JavaScript.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
WebGL Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – testing some post-process effects


  1. Open the file ch10_PostProcess.html in an HTML5 browser.

    The buttons at the bottom allow you to switch between several sample effects. Try each of them to get a feel for the effect they have on the scene. We've already looked at grayscale, so let's examine the rest of filters individually.

  2. The invert effect is similar to grayscale, in that it only modifies the color output; this time inverting each color channel.

    uniform sampler2D uSampler;
    varying vec2 vTextureCoord;
    
    void main(void)
    {
        vec4 frameColor = texture2D(uSampler, vTextureCoord);
        gl_FragColor = vec4(1.0-frameColor.r, 1.0-frameColor.g, 1.0-frameColor.b, frameColor.a);
    }
  3. The wavy effect manipulates the texture coordinates to make the scene swirl and sway. In this effect, we also provide the current time to allow the distortion to change as time progresses.

    uniform sampler2D uSampler;
    uniform float uTime;
    varying vec2 vTextureCoord;
    
    const float speed = 15.0;
    const float magnitude...