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


Let's take a step back to take a look at the big picture. We mentioned before that in our architecture we have defined three main functions that define the lifecycle of our WebGL application. These functions are: configure, load, and render.

Up to this point, we have set up the scene writing the code for the configure function. After that, we have created our JSON cars and loaded them by writing the code for the load function. Now, we will implement the code for the third function: the render function.

The code is pretty standard and almost identical to the draw/render functions that we have written in previous chapters. As we can see in the following diagram, we set and clear the area that we are going to draw on, then we check on the camera perspective and then we process every object in Scene.objects.

The only consideration that we need to have here is to make sure that we are mapping correctly the material properties defined in our JSON objects to the appropriate shader uniforms...