Learning WebGL

Lots of good stuff today:

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this: Nick Whitelegg has posted the first steps towards his 3D OpenStreetMap viewer. This looks really promising!
Ben Vanik’s moving fast; his first post on WebGL was just the other day, and now he’s posted a very impressive demo of MegaTextures in WebGL, complete with [...]

There’s been some discussion on the forum about a recent change to the WebGL API. The full details are below, but the short version is that a number of methods on the GL context were merged together and changed their names; most importantly, gl.getProgrami and gl.getShaderi were merged into new functions called gl.getProgramParameter and [...]

Here’s something new: a list of some of the current bugs and limitations in WebGL implementations, by Ben Vanik. Looks like most of them are advanced enough that they’ll be fixed before the lessons on this site need the functionality, but if you’re doing more complex stuff and are tearing your hair out trying [...]

…is ready to play with. The code is not quite ready for prime time, so please don’t base anything on it It works for me in Chrome, but for some reason with Firefox it works from a local disk but not from the site. Odd. I’ll debug that over [...]

Wow, the demos are coming thick and fast now — today’s is from Coolcat, and is the first steps towards a clone of the popular KDE game “Konquest”, in which you can fly around a model of the solar system (just the Sun, Earth and Mars for now). To control it, use WASDQE to [...]

Wow. Seriously, wow. An animated 3D character from Paul Brunt.

Some cool new stuff today!

An amazing paint program, using 3D cubes as a brush, from Ilmari Heikkinen.
José Miguel Lueiza’s WebGL tortoise is now live.
Some interesting news in a tweet from Oliver Hunt, a Safari developer: “Yet another big WebGL API change — type suffixes are no longer used for most get functions; eg. getUniform{if}[v] is [...]

I spent a bit of time trying to track this one down… If, when you’re calling drawArrays, you get an error message in your console like this:

No VBO bound to index 1 (or it’s been deleted)!

…Minefield is trying to tell you that you’ve forgotten to bind an array buffer to one of your attributes — [...]

<< Lesson 8Lesson 10 >>
Welcome to my number nine in my series of WebGL tutorials, based on number 9 in the NeHe OpenGL tutorials. In it, we’ll use JavaScript objects so that we can have a number of independently-animated objects in our 3d scene. We’ll also touch on how to change the colour [...]

I’m based in the UK, but I’ve noticed that many readers of this blog are from the US. Some of my happiest visits to that country have been over Thanksgiving, including one particularly nice one when a Californian colleague invited all of us orphaned visiting Brits to her family dinner. I hadn’t previously [...]