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

Defining what the GUI will look like


We will define a very simple layout for our application. The title will go on top, and then we have two div tags. The div on the left will contain the instructions and the tools we can use on the scene. The canvas will be placed inside the div on the right, shown as follows:

The code to achieve this layout looks like this (css/cars.css):

#header
{
	height: 50px;
	background-color: #ccc;
	margin-bottom: 10px;
}

#nav
{
	float: left;
	width: 28%;
	height: 80%;
	background-color: #ccc;
	margin-bottom: 1px;
}

#content
{
	float: right;
	margin-left: 1%;
	width: 70%;
	height: 80%;
	background-color: #ccc;
	margin-bottom: 1px;
}

And we can use it like this (taken from ch9_GUI.html):

<body>
<div id="header">
<h1>Show Room</h1>
</div>

<div id="nav">
<b>Instructions</b>
</div>

<div id="content">
<h2>canvas goes here</h2>
</div>
</body>

Please make sure that you include cars.css in...