Learning WebGL

Hi all — I’m back again, this time with what may well be the last WebGL roundup for 2009!

Not just one, but two Google Web Toolkit ports for WebGL! GWT lets you write your web apps in Java rather than JavaScript, and provides a number of useful extra widgets. Coolcat has been working [...]

Unfortunately I won’t be able to post anything over the next few days; it appears that there’s some kind of event happening that makes seeing family more important than WebGL. Luckily, there have been some amazing new demos, so hopefully you won’t get bored in my absence

Jonas Sicking has taken my Mandelbrot [...]

<< Lesson 10Lesson 12 >>
Welcome to my number eleven in my series of WebGL tutorials, the first one that isn’t based on the NeHe OpenGL tutorials. In it, we’ll show a texture-mapped sphere with directional lighting, which the viewer can spin around using the mouse.
Here’s what the lesson looks like when run on a [...]

Ilmari Heikkinen has posted some interesting thoughts about how to load large 3D models as binary data, as compared to using the text-based OBJ format (with, of course, a demo, which uses specular per-pixel lighting, both of which techniques are coming soon in the lessons
From Stephen Shankland, a very good introductory article on [...]

I’m a bit late with both of these:

Nick Whitelegg’s terrain 3D OpenStreetMap viewer now shows terrain! This sounds like it could really be useful, and I’m very much looking forward to trying this out on a mobile WebGL implementation (I’m hoping to get my hands on an N900 soon
Andor Salga has been [...]

Just one link today: Coolcat has made a lot of progress on his clone of the KDE game “Konquest”, and it’s looking very cool indeed. Here’s the game itself, but it’s well worth watching his YouTube video of it to see how to use it.

There have been a lot of news articles about WebGL since the spec went public on Friday, but less in the way of new demos (though if you haven’t checked out the Khronos WebGL demo repository yet, you really should!). So, I was really happy to see two new pages this morning:

Paul Brunt’s [...]

The new draft spec of WebGL changes the name we use to get the context from the canvas; it used to be moz-webgl for Mozilla or webkit-3d for WebKit. The new standard is experimental-webgl, which the current nightly builds of Firefox seem to use (though they also seem to support the old name), but [...]

This is really good news: the draft WebGL spec is now officially available. No more looking at the Mozilla or the WebKit source to try to work out what the available functions are!
As well as the spec, the Khronos guys have put together two brilliant new resources: a WebGL Wiki and a public mailing [...]

Lesson 11 is ready to go; it introduces code to draw spheres, per-object rotation matrices, and mouse control! Here’s the WebGL page, and here’s a video showing what it looks like:

I was originally planning to do a follow-up to lesson 10 to introduce lighting, but unfortunately it wound up being messier than I expected, entirely [...]