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

Loading the cars


Next, we need to implement the load function. Here is where we usually use AJAX to download the objects that will appear on the scene.

When we have the JSON files corresponding to the cars the procedure is really simple, we just use the Scene object to load these files. However, most commonly than not, you will not have ready-to-use JSON files. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there are specialized design tools such as Blender that allow creating these models.

Nonetheless, we are assuming that you are not an expert 3D modeler (neither we are). So we will use pre-built models. We will use cars from blendswap.org, these models are publically available, free of charge, and free to distribute.

Before we can use the models, we need to export them to an intermediate file format from where we can extract the geometry and the material properties so we can create our corresponding JSON files. The file format that we are going to use is Wavefront OBJ.

Exporting the Blender...