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 seen how to use colors on objects, lights, and on the scene in general. Specifically, we have learned that an object can be colored per vertex, per fragment, or it can have a constant color.

The color of light sources in the scene depends on implemented lighting model. Not all lights need to be always white. We have also seen how uniform arrays simplify working with multiple lights in ESSL and in JavaScript WebGL. Also we have created point directional lights.

The alpha value does not necessarily make an object translucent. Interpolative blending is necessary to create translucent objects. Also, the objects need to be rendered back-to-front.

Additionally, face culling can help to produce better results when there are multiple translucent objects present in the scene.

In Chapter 7, Textures, we will study how to paint images over our objects. For that we will use WebGL textures.