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

Bridging the gap between WebGL and ESSL


Let's see in practice how we integrate our ESSL program to our WebGL code by working on a simple example from scratch.

We have a wall composed of the sections A, B, and C. Imagine that you are facing section B (as shown in the following diagram) and that you have a flashlight on your hand (Frontal View). Intuitively section A and section C will be darker than section B. This fact can be modeled by starting at the color of the center of section B and darkening the color of the surrounding pixels as we move away from the center.

Let's summarize here the code that we need to write:

  1. Write the ESSL program. Code the ESSL vertex and fragment shaders. We know how to do this already. For the wall, we are going to select Goraud shading with a Diffuse/Lambertian reflection model.

  2. Write the initProgram function. We already saw how to do this. We need to make sure that we map all the attributes and uniforms that we had defined in the ESSL code. Including the normals...