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 reviewed the concepts and the code developed throughout the book. We have also built a simple application that shows how all the elements fit together.

We have learned that designing complex models requires specialized tools such as Blender. We also saw that most of the current 3D graphics formats require the definition of vertices, indices, normals, and texture coordinates. We studied how to obtain these elements from a Blender model and parse them into JSON files that we can load into a WebGL scene.

In the next and final chapter, we will give you a sneak peak of some of the advanced techniques that are used regularly in 3D computer graphic systems including games, simulations, and other 3D applications in general. We will see how to implement these techniques in WebGL.