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

Rendering to an offscreen framebuffer


In order to perform object selection using the offscreen framebuffer, this one has to be synchronized with the onscreen default framebuffer every time that this last one receives an update. If the onscreen framebuffer and the offscreen framebuffer were not synchronized, then we could be missing addition or deletion of objects, or updates in the camera position between buffers. As a result of it there would not be a correspondence.

A lack of correspondence will hinder us from reading the picking colors from the offscreen framebuffer and use them to identify the objects in the scene. We can also refer to picking colors as object labels.

To implement this synchronicity, we will create the render function. This function calls the draw function twice. First when the offscreen buffer is bound and second time when onscreen default framebuffer is bound. The code looks like this:

function render(){
    //off-screen rendering
    gl.bindFramebuffer(gl.FRAMEBUFFER...