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

Lights, normals, and materials


In the real world, we see objects because they reflect light. Any object will reflect light depending on the position and relative distance to the light source; the orientation of its surface, which is represented by normal vectors and the material of the object which determines how much light is reflected. In this chapter, we will learn how to combine these three elements in WebGL to model different illumination schemes.

Lights

Light sources can be positional or directional. A light source is called positional when its location will affect how the scene is lit. For instance, a lamp inside a room falls under this category. Objects far from the lamp will receive very little light and they will appear obscure. In contrast, directional lights refer to lights that produce the same result independent from their position. For example, the light of the sun will illuminate all the objects in a terrestrial scene, regardless of their distance from the sun.

A positional...