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

Summary


In this chapter, we have discussed how WebGL renders geometry. Remember that there are two kinds of WebGL buffers that deal with geometry rendering: VBOs and IBOs.

WebGL's rendering pipeline describes how the WebGL buffers are used and passed in the form of attributes to be processed by the vertex shader. The vertex shader parallelizes vertex processing in the GPU. Vertices define the surface of the geometry that is going to be rendered. Every element on this surface is known as a fragment. These fragments are processed by the fragment shader. Fragment processing also occurs in parallel in the GPU. When all the fragments have been processed, the framebuffer, a two-dimensional array, contains the image that is then displayed on your screen.

WebGL works as a state machine. As such, properties referring to buffers are available and their values will be dependent on the buffer currently bound.

We also saw that JSON and AJAX are two JavaScript technologies that integrate really well with...