Learning WebGL

A lot of new stuff over the last three days:

Over at 3D test, an interview with Paul Brunt of GLGE fame — well worth reading.
On thing that’s going to be important for WebGL going forward is the ability to load up objects that have been designed in 3D modeling tools like Blender, Autodesk 3D Studio [...]

Three framework updates today!

Benjamin DeLillo has been quiet for a while, but he’s been working hard on WebGLU, adding (among other things) keyframe animation, image and video-based textures, shader loading from external files, and the beginning stages of import capabilities for .obj files (a common format for 3D models). His blog post gives more [...]

<< Lesson 12Lesson 14 >>
Welcome to my number thirteen in my series of WebGL tutorials! In it, we’ll cover per-fragment lighting, which is harder work for the graphics card than the per-vertex lighting we’ve been doing so far, but gives much more realistic results. We’ll also look at how you can switch the [...]

For lesson 13, I needed to be able to easily switch the WebGL program object (which manages the shaders) so that you can see the effects of per-vertex or per-pixel lighting just by toggling a checkbox. Obviously, changing which program you’re using means that the code that draws the scene needs to use the [...]

Lots of YouTube stuff today:

Another very cool graphics-card overloading page from the demo scene guys, who specialise in creating very cool scenes using jaw-droppingly tiny amounts of code, all in the fragment shaders. This one’s called Four Dollar Plastic Laminator, it’s apparently a 1k demo (meaning it’s all coded in just one kilobyte of [...]

Apparently, gl.enable(gl.TEXTURE_2D) is invalid WebGL, and is absolutely not needed (according to the spec) to make textures work.
However, pipy says in the comments that, at least for him, textures don’t appear without it. Both pipy and Kenneth Russell suspect that the cause might be the graphics driver. [UPDATE: sounds like that was it: he's [...]

More news from Lindsay Kay about SceneJS — he’s just released version 0.4.0, which has some serious performance improvements, most interestingly including a replacement of the Sylvester matrix/vector library with some streamlined 3D-specific code. Sounds very promising!
Paul Brunt’s GLGE framework is also moving rapidly forward, and now supports picking — that is, the ability [...]

Two updates today:

Eric Shepherd’s tutorial on WebGL at the Mozilla Developer Center, which I think only started a week ago, is progressing by leaps and bounds: so far, he’s covered similar ground to the first seven lessons here, but his latest is very impressive indeed: how to animate textures by mapping an Ogg video onto [...]

As they say, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other… I’ve made some more retrospective changes. The good news first:
On the WebGL Wiki, Gman just removed the code saying gl.enable(gl.TEXTURE_2D) from the tutorial, saying that it’s not required, or indeed valid WebGL! I checked on the mailing list, and [...]

Two new links for today:

I’d been wondering how long it would be before someone put together a multi-player WebGL game (or at least demo); it looks like Peter Strohm has managed to get the first one done! (Minefield only right now.)
Don’t know how I missed this one on the EWGL blog — some musings on [...]