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Jan 242014
 

teapots The Red Book samples included a short demo on OpenGL materials. The demo is quite old but is still valuable when considering the Phong lighting equation. In the original C source file several materials are defined and the resulting app produces an image such as the icon of this post.

This post contains a WebGL demo where the different materials can be applied to a model.

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Jan 232014
 

The JSON format is an easy and simple way to get 3D models uploaded into a WebGL application. Lighthouse3D provides a tool (source code and visual studio project available) that uses Assim to read standard 3D model files (OBJ, Collada, 3ds, among many others) and produces a JSON formatted file containing the vertex information (positions, normals and tex coords) as well as material description.

An example of a WebGL page where such content is used is available in here.

Mar 222013
 

udacity

Eric Haines (co-author of Real-Time Rendering) is lecturing an online course at Udacity – Interactive 3D Graphics. The course covers the basic principles of 3D computer graphics, including meshes, geometric transformation, camera definition, lighting and materials, and also animation.

Syllabus:

  • Lesson 1: Introduction – Motivation and a trip down the graphics pipeline, laying out the fundamental processes
  • Lesson 2: Points, Vectors, and Meshes – The basics of 3D geometry definition
  • Lesson 3: Colors and Materials – Color representation, material computations, transparency
  • Lesson 4: Transforms – Translation, scale, rotate and how to properly combine all these
  • Lesson 5: Matrices – Transform representation and how to fully control these
  • Lesson 6: Lights and Cameras – Directional and point light sources, and how the camera is defined
  • Lesson 7: Textures and Reflections – Color and opacity textures, along with reflection and normal mapping
  • Lesson 8: Shader Programming – An introduction to programming vertex and pixel shaders
  • Lesson 9: Interaction and Animation – How to select and make objects move
May 062011
 

Chrome Experiments – WebGL Globe. The Globe is a project for geographic data visualization. The project is open source and you are encouraged to use it to display your own world scattered data. Currently there are two samples: world population from 1990, 1995, 2000; and Google Search Visualization Volumes per language.