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

Time for action – rendering a square


Follow the given steps:

  1. Open the file ch_Square.html in your favorite HTML editor (ideally one that supports syntax highlighting like Notepad++ or Crimson Editor).

  2. Let's examine the structure of this file with the help of the following diagram:

  3. The web page contains the following:

    • The script <script id="shader-fs" type="x-shader/x-fragment"> contains the fragment shader code.

    • The script <script id="shader-vs" type="x-shader/x-vertex"> contains the vertex shader code. We will not be paying attention to these two scripts as these will be the main point of study in the next chapter. For now, let's notice that we have a fragment shader and a vertex shader.

    • The next script on our web page <script id="code-js" type="text/javascript"> contains all the JavaScript WebGL code that we will need. This script is divided into the following functions:

    • getGLContext : Similar to the function that we saw in the previous chapter, this function allows us to get...