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

Creating a WebGL application


At this point, we have covered the basic topics that you need to be familiar with in order to create a WebGL application. These topics have been implemented in the infrastructure code that we have iteratively built up throughout the book. Let's see what we have learned so far.

In Chapter 3, Lights!, we introduced WebGL and learned how to enable it in our browser. We also learned that WebGL behaves as a state machine and that we can query the different variables that determine the current state using gl. getParameter.

After that, we studied in Chapter 2, Rendering Geometry, that the objects of a WebGL scene are defined by vertices. We said that usually we use indices to label those vertices so we can quickly tell WebGL how to 'connect the dots' to render the object. We studied the functions that manipulate buffers and the two main functions to render geometry drawArrays (no indices) and drawElements (with indices). We also learned about the JSON format to represent...