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)

More on Lights: Positional Lights

Before finishing this chapter, let's revisit the topic of lights. So far, for the purpose of our examples, we’ve assumed that our light source is infinitely far away from the scene. This assumption allows us to model the light rays as being parallel to each other. An example of this is sunlight. These lights are directional lights. Now, we are going to consider a case where the light source is relatively close to the object it needs to illuminate. Think, for example, of a desk lamp illuminating the document you’re reading. These lights are positional lights:

As we experienced before, when working with directional lights, only one variable is required. This is the light direction we represented in the uLightDirection uniform.

In contrast, when working with positional lights, we need to know the location of the light. We can...