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

Virtual Car Showroom application


Using our WebGL skills and the infrastructure code that we have developed, we will create an application that allows visualizing different 3D car models. The final result will look like this:

First of all, we need to define what the graphical user interface (GUI) is going to look like. Then, we will be adding WebGL support by creating a canvas element and obtaining the correspondent WebGL context. Simultaneously, we need to define and implement the Vertex Shader and Fragment Shader using ESSL. After that, we need to implement the three functions that constitute the lifecycle of our application: configure, load, and render.

First, let's consider some particularities of our virtual showroom application.

Complexity of the models

A real-world application is different from a proof of concept demo in that the models that we will be loading are much more detailed than simple spheres, cones, and other geometric figures. Usually, models have lots of vertices conforming...