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

Setting up the scene


We set up the scene by writing the code for the configure function. Let's analyze it line by line:

var camera = null, transforms = null;
function configure(){

At this stage, we want to set some of the WebGL properties such as the clear color and the depth test. After that, we need to create a camera and set its original position and orientation. Also we need to create a camera interactor so that we can update the camera position when we click and drag on the HTML5 canvas in our web page. Finally, we want to define the JavaScript variables that will be mapped to the shaders. We can also initialize some of them at this point.

To accomplish the aforementioned tasks we will use Camera.js, CameraInteractor.js, and Program.js and SceneTransforms.js from our architecture.