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

Structure of the WebGL examples


We have improved the structure of the code examples in this chapter. As the complexity of our WebGL applications increases, it is wise to have a good, maintainable, and clear design. We have left this section at the end of the chapter so you can use it as a reference when working on the exercises.

Just like in previous exercises, our entry point is the runWebGLApp function which is called when the page is loaded. There we create an instance of WebGLApp, as shown in the previous diagram.

WebGLApp

This class encapsulates some of the utility functions that were present in our examples in previous chapters. It also declares a clear and simple life cycle for a WebGL application. WebGLApp has three function hooks that we can map to functions in our web page. These hooks determine what functions will be called for each stage in the life cycle of the app. In the examples of this chapter, we have created the following mappings:

  • configureGLHook: which points to the configure...