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 – exploring translations: world space versus camera space


  1. Open ch4_ModelView_Translation.html in your HTML5 browser:

  2. We are looking from a distance at the positive z-axis at a cone located at the origin of the world. There are three sliders that will allow you to translate either the world or the camera on the x, y, and z axis, respectively. The world space is activated by default.

  3. Can you tell by looking at the World-View matrix on the screen where the origin of the world is? Is it [0,0,0]? (Hint: check where we define translations in the Model-View matrix).

  4. We can think of the canvas as the image that our camera sees. If the world center is at [0,-2,-50], where is the camera?

  5. If we want to see the cone closer, we would have to move the center of the world towards the camera. We know that the camera is far on the positive z-axis of the world, so the translation will occur on the z-axis. Given that you are on world coordinates, do we need to increase or decrease the z-axis slider...