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

Summary


In this chapter, we have learned how to implement color-based picking in WebGL. Picking based on a diffuse color is a bad idea because there could be scenarios where several objects have the same diffuse color. It is better to assign a new color property that is unique for every object to perform picking. We called this property picking color/object label.

Through the discussion of the picking implementation, we learned that WebGL provides mechanisms to create offscreen framebuffers and that what we see on screen when we render a scene corresponds to the default framebuffer contents.

We also studied the difference between a framebuffer and a renderbuffer. We saw that a renderbuffer is a special buffer that is attached to a framebuffer. Renderbuffers are used to store information that does not have a texture representation such as depth values. In contrast, textures can be used to store colors.

We saw too that a framebuffer needs at least one texture to store colors and a renderbuffer...