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)

Time for Action: Adding a White Light to a Scene

Let's cover an example of how we'd add a new light to our scene:

  1. Open the ch06_04_wall-light-arrays.html file in your browser. This scene looks exactly like ch06_03_wall-final.html; however, the code is far less complex since we are now using uniform arrays. Let's see how using uniform arrays changes our code.
  2. Open the ch06_04_wall-light-arrays.html file in your code editor. Let's take a look at the vertex shader. Note the use of the constant integer expression const int, numLights = 3;, to declare the number of lights that the shader will handle.
  1. There, you can also see that a uniform array is being used to operate on light positions. Note that we are using a varying array to pass the light rays (for each light) to the fragment shader:
for(int i = 0; i < numLights; i++) {
vec4 lightPosition = uModelViewMatrix...