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  • Learning Three.js: The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL - Second Edition
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Learning Three.js: The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL - Second Edition

Learning Three.js: The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL - Second Edition

By : Jos Dirksen
4.4 (14)
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Learning Three.js: The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL - Second Edition

Learning Three.js: The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL - Second Edition

4.4 (14)
By: Jos Dirksen

Overview of this book

If you know JavaScript and want to start creating 3D graphics that run in any browser, this book is a great choice for you. You don't need to know anything about math or WebGL; all that you need is general knowledge of JavaScript and HTML.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
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Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. Creating Your First 3D Scene with Three.js
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1. Creating Your First 3D Scene with Three.js
Requirements to use Three.js
Getting the source code
Creating the HTML skeleton
Rendering and viewing a 3D object
Adding materials, lights, and shadows
Expanding your first scene with animations
Using dat.GUI to make experimenting easier
Automatically resize the output when browser size changes
Summary
2
2. Basic Components That Make Up a Three.js Scene
2. Basic Components That Make Up a Three.js Scene
Creating a scene
Geometries and meshes
Different cameras for different uses
Summary
3
3. Working with the Different Light Sources Available in Three.js
3. Working with the Different Light Sources Available in Three.js
Different kinds of lighting provided by Three.js
Basic lights
Special lights
Summary
4
4. Working with Three.js Materials
4. Working with Three.js Materials
Understanding common material properties
Starting with a simple mesh
Advanced materials
Materials you can use for a line geometry
Summary
5
5. Learning to Work with Geometries
5. Learning to Work with Geometries
The basic geometries provided by Three.js
Summary
6
6. Advanced Geometries and Binary Operations
6. Advanced Geometries and Binary Operations
THREE.ConvexGeometry
THREE.LatheGeometry
Creating 3D text
Using binary operations to combine meshes
Summary
7
7. Particles, Sprites, and the Point Cloud
7. Particles, Sprites, and the Point Cloud
Understanding particles
Particles, THREE.PointCloud, and THREE.PointCloudMaterial
Styling particles with the HTML5 canvas
Using textures to style particles
Working with sprite maps
Creating THREE.PointCloud from an advanced geometry
Summary
8
8. Creating and Loading Advanced Meshes and Geometries
8. Creating and Loading Advanced Meshes and Geometries
Geometry grouping and merging
Summary
9
9. Animations and Moving the Camera
9. Animations and Moving the Camera
Basic animations
Working with the camera
Morphing and skeletal animation
Creating animations using external models
Summary
10
10. Loading and Working with Textures
10. Loading and Working with Textures
Using textures in materials
Advanced usage of textures
Summary
11
11. Custom Shaders and Render Postprocessing
11. Custom Shaders and Render Postprocessing
Setting up Three.js for postprocessing
Postprocessing passes
Creating custom postprocessing shaders
Summary
12
12. Adding Physics and Sounds to Your Scene
12. Adding Physics and Sounds to Your Scene
Creating a basic Three.js scene
Material properties
Basic supported shapes
Using constraints to limit movement of objects
Summary
13
Index
Index

Requirements to use Three.js

Three.js is a JavaScript library, so all you need to create Three.js WebGL applications is a text editor and one of the supported browsers to render the results. I would like to recommend two JavaScript editors, which I've started using exclusively over the last couple of years:

  • WebStorm: This editor from the JetBrains guides has great support for editing JavaScript. It supports code completion, automatic deployment, and JavaScript debugging directly from the editor. Besides this, WebStorm has excellent GitHub (and other version control systems) support. You can download a trial edition from http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/.
  • Notepad++: Notepad++ is a general-purpose editor that supports code highlighting for a wide range of programming languages. It can easily lay out and format JavaScript. Note that Notepad++ is only for Windows. You can download Notepad++ from http://notepad-plus-plus.org/.
  • Sublime Text Editor: Sublime is a great editor that has a very good support to edit JavaScript. Besides this, it provides many very helpful selections (such as multiple-line select) and edit options that, once you get used to them, provide a really good JavaScript-editing environment. Sublime can also be tested for free and can be downloaded from http://www.sublimetext.com/.

Even if you don't use any of these editors, there are a lot of editors available, open source and commercial, which you can use to edit JavaScript and create your Three.js projects. An interesting project you might want to look at is http://c9.io. This is a cloud-based JavaScript editor that can be connected to a GitHub account. This way, you can directly access all the source code and examples from this book and experiment with them.

Tip

Besides these text-based editors that you can use to edit and experiment with the sources from this book, Three.js currently also provides an online editor itself.

With this editor, which you can find at http://threejs.org/editor/, you can create Three.js scenes using a graphical approach.

I mentioned that most modern web browsers support WebGL and can be used to run Three.js examples. I usually run my code in Chrome. The reason is that most often, Chrome has the best support and performance for WebGL and it has a really great JavaScript debugger. With this debugger, which is shown in the following screenshot, you can quickly pinpoint problems, for instance, using breakpoints and console output. This is exemplified in the following screenshot. Throughout this book, I'll give you pointers on debugger usage and other debugging tips and tricks.

Requirements to use Three.js

That's enough for an introduction to Three.js for now; let's get the source code and start with the first scene.

End of Section 2
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