Book Image

Real-Time 3D Graphics with WebGL 2 - Second Edition

By : Farhad Ghayour, Diego Cantor
5 (1)
Book Image

Real-Time 3D Graphics with WebGL 2 - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Farhad Ghayour, Diego Cantor

Overview of this book

As highly interactive applications have become an increasingly important part of the user experience, WebGL is a unique and cutting-edge technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the web. Packed with 80+ examples, this book guides readers through the landscape of real-time computer graphics using WebGL 2. Each chapter covers foundational concepts in 3D graphics programming with various implementations. Topics are always associated with exercises for a hands-on approach to learning. This book presents a clear roadmap to learning real-time 3D computer graphics with WebGL 2. 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 3D computer graphics topics, including rendering, colors, textures, transformations, framebuffers, lights, surfaces, blending, geometry construction, advanced techniques, and more. With each chapter, you will "level up" your 3D graphics programming skills. This book will become your trustworthy companion in developing highly interactive 3D web applications with WebGL and JavaScript.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Lights

In the previous chapter, we covered WebGL's rendering pipeline, defining geometries, passing data to the GPU, drawing types, and leveraging AJAX to asynchronously load external assets. Although we briefly covered shaders and their role in creating a WebGL application, we will go into more detail in this chapter and leverage the vertex and fragment shaders to create a lighting model for our scene.

Shaders allow us to define a mathematical model that governs how our scene is lit. To learn how to implement shaders, we will study different algorithms and see examples of their application. A basic knowledge of linear algebra will be really useful to help you understand the contents of this chapter. We will use a JavaScript library that handles most of the vector and matrix operations, so you do not need to worry about the mathematical operations. Nonetheless, your overall...