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)

Loading the Cars

Inside of the load function, we will download some assets in the background that we can load into our application.

When the JSON files that describe the cars are available, we just use the scene instance to load these files. Keep in mind that it's uncommon to have ready-to-use JSON files. In such situations, there are specialized design tools, such as Blender, which can significantly help create and convert consumable models.

That said, we will use the pre-built models that are available on blendswap.org. All of these models are publicly available, and are free of charge to use and distribute. Before we can use these models, we need to export them to an intermediate file format from where we can extract the geometry and material properties to create the appropriate JSON files. The file format we are going to use is Wavefront OBJ.

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