February 2014
Intermediate to advanced
401 pages
11h 20m
English
Content preview from Programming 3D Applications with HTML5 and WebGLBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 3. Three.js—A JavaScript 3D Engine
The previous chapter demonstrated both the power and complexity of programming in WebGL. WebGL allows access to the full capabilities of the GPU to create beautiful real-time 3D renderings and animations in web pages. But to do anything more than the most basic tasks using the API out of the box requires serious effort and literally hundreds of lines of code. This is not a recipe for rapidly building applications on web time. Depending on the kind of project you are contemplating, most developers are faced with a choice: build your own helper library to ease the pain, or use any one of several libraries already out there.
While there are many choices for getting started with your WebGL development, the undisputed leader in this category is Three.js. Three.js provides an easy, intuitive set of objects that are commonly found in 3D graphics. It is fast, using many best-practice graphics engine techniques. It is powerful, with several built-in object types and handy utilities. It is open source, hosted on GitHub, and well maintained, with several authors contributing to it.
Three.js has become something of a de facto choice for WebGL development. Most of the great WebGL content you can view online has been built with it, including Google’s 100,000 Stars (see Chapter 1), and several rich and highly innovative works live on the Web today.
Three.js Flagship Projects
Perhaps the most well-known WebGL project to date is RO.ME “3 Dreams of Black”, an ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.