WebGL Programming Guide: Interactive 3D Graphics Programming with WebGL

Appendix G. World Coordinate System Versus Local Coordinate System

In Chapter 7, “Toward the 3D World,” you used and displayed your first 3D object (a cube), allowing the sample program to begin to feel more like a “real” 3D application. However, to do so, you had to manually set up the vertex coordinates and the index information of the cube, which was quite time consuming. Although you will do the same manual setup throughout this book, this is not something you will generally do when creating your own WebGL applications. Usually you will use a dedicated 3D modeling tool to create 3D objects. This allows you to create elaborate 3D objects through the manipulation (combination, deformation, vertex population adjustment, vertex interval tuning, ...