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

Use of color in lights


Colors are light properties. In Chapter 3, Lights, we saw that the number of light properties depend on the lighting reflection model selected for the scene. For instance, using a Lambertian reflection model we would only need to model one shader uniform: the light diffuse property/color. In contrast, if the Phong reflection model were selected, each light source would need to have three properties: the ambient, diffuse, and specular colors.

Note

The light position is usually also modeled as a uniform when the shader needs to know where the light source is. Therefore, a Phong model with a positional light would have four uniforms: ambient, diffuse, specular, and position.

For the case of directional lights, the fourth uniform is the light direction. Refer to the More on Lights: positional lights section discussed in Chapter 3, Lights!.

We have also seen that each light property is represented by a four-element array in JavaScript and that these arrays are mapped to the...