The Lessons
I’ve been creating a series of lessons as a way of teaching myself WebGL. The first ten are based on the well-known , but I’ve diverged since then. Here are the ones so far. If English isn’t your first language, you might like these translations of the lessons: Chinese: Spanish: Japanese: shows you how to download, install and configure a web browser that can show WebGL content, and gives links to a set of pages that show what it can do. gives you an overview of how WebGL works, with enough code to simply draw a static triangle and a square on the screen. builds on lesson 1, and adds colour to the triangle and the square. builds on lesson 2, making the triangle and the square spin around. builds on lesson 3, bringing us into the third dimension fully by replacing the triangle with a pyramid and the square with a cube. shows how you can use an image file to “skin” your 3D objects, giving you a quick and easy way to make them look more interesting. builds on lesson 6, showing you somemore advanced ways to use textures, and also gives some pointers on how to read the keyboard in a way appropriate for 3D scenes and for games. introduces the two simplest forms of lighting. shows one way in which you can simulate transparent materials in WebGL, teaching you a little more theory along the way. uses simple object-oriented techniques to give us number of independently-animated objects moving around the screen at the same time. uses techniques from the previous lesson, along with a new trick to simulate a camera that moves around the scene, and demonstrates a kind of nano-Doom shows how to draw spheres, and how to write code so that the user can spin them using the mouse. shows how implement lighting that seems to come from points within your 3D scene. describes a way of doing more realistic lighting at the cost of more processing time for the graphics card. makes the lighting even better by adding specular highlights, and also shows how to use load up models of 3D objectsfrom JSON files. shows how to use specular maps, which give your scenes greater realism by making it easy to specify how reflective an object is at every point on its surface, just as normal textures allow you to specify its detailed colour. shows how to render a WebGL scene into a texture that can then be used in another scene — a neat trick in itself, and a useful foundation for other techiques.