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: Directional Point Lights

In Chapter 3, Lights, we compared directional and positional lights:

In point lighting, for every point on the surface of our object, we compute the direction from the light to that point on the surface. We then do the same thing we did for directional lighting. Remember that we took the dot product of the surface normal (the direction the surface is facing) and the light direction. This gave us a value of 1 if the two directions matched, which means the fragment should be fully lit, 0 if the two directions were perpendicular, and -1 if they were opposite. We directly used that value to multiply the color of the surface, which gave us lighting.

In this section, we will combine directional and positional lights. We are going to create a third type of light: a directional point light, commonly referred to as a spot light. This light has...