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

Clicking on the canvas


The next step is to capture the mouse coordinates when the user clicks on an object in the scene and reads the color value for these coordinates from the offscreen framebuffer.

For that, we use the standard onmouseup event from the canvas element in our webpage:

var canvas = document.getElementById('my-canvas-id');

canvas.onmouseup = function (ev){
    //capture coordinates from the ev event
    ...
}

There is an extra bit of work to do here given that the ev event does not return the mouse coordinates with respect to the canvas but with respect to the upper-left corner of the browser window (ev.clientX and ev.clientY). Then, we need to bubble up through the DOM getting the location of the elements that are in the DOM hierarchy to know the total offset that we have.

We do this with a code fragment like this inside the canvas.onmouseup function:

var x, y, top = 0, left = 0, obj = canvas;

while (obj&& && obj.tagName !== 'BODY') {
  top  += obj.offsetTop...