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

Writing ESSL programs


Let's now take a step back and take a look at the big picture. ESSL allows us to implement a lighting strategy provided that we define a shading method and a light reflection model. In this section, we will take a sphere as the object that we want to illuminate and we will see how the selection of a lighting strategy changes the scene.

We will see two scenarios for Goraud interpolation: with Lambertian and with Phong reflections; and only one case for Phong interpolation: under Phong shading the Lambertian reflection model is no different from a Phong reflection model where the ambient and specular components are set to zero.

Goraud shading with Lambertian reflections

The Lambertian reflection model only considers the interaction of diffuse material and diffuse light properties. In short, we assign the final color as:

Final Vertex Color = Id

where the following value is seen:

Id = Light Diffuse Property * Material Diffuse Property * Lambert coefficient

Under Goraud shading...