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 – bouncing ball


  1. Open ch5_BouncingBalls.html in your HTML5-enabled Internet browser.

  2. The orbiting camera is activated by default. Move the camera and you will see how all the objects adjust to the global transform (camera) and yet they keep bouncing according to its local transform (bouncing ball).

  3. Let's explain here a little bit more in detail how we keep track of each ball.

    • First of all let's define some global variables and constants:

      var ball = [];        //Each element of this array is a ball
      var BALL_GRAVITY = 9.8;  //Earth acceleration 9.8 m/s2
      var NUM_BALLS = 50;      //Number of balls in this simulation
    • Next, we need to initialize the ball array. We use a for loop in the load function to achieve it:

      for (var i=0;i<NUM_BALLS;i++){
             ball.push(new BouncingBall());
             Scene.loadObject('models/geometry/ball.json','ball'+i);
      }
    • The BouncingBall function initializes the simulation variables for each ball in the ball array. One of this attributes is the position, which...