Sketchnotes from LWS3D - A 50-line WebGL app
Posted on by Steve Workman About 1 min reading time
After a summer break, London Web Standards was back with an evening of WebGL with Ilmari Heikkenen from Google and a short demo from Carlos Ulloa of HelloEnjoy. Sketchnotes are below
Carlos Ulloa of Brighton-based HelloEnjoy showed off two demos that he made using Three.js and WebGL. The first was HelloRacer, an interactive look at the 2010 Ferrari F1 car that you can even drive and do handbrake turns in. The second demo got it premiere at LWS, an interactive music video for Ellie Goulding's "Lights". Honestly, it was extremely cool, on a Ro.me "3 dreams of black" scale. It'll appear at the linked URL in the next week or so. There's a great Q&A session on the London Web Standards blog of the event for more detail on how they did it.
Ilmari Heikkenen showed the gathered crowd how to make a basic WebGL app using Three.js in about 50 lines. He showed off all of the components that you need: a renderer, scene, camera, mesh and lights (and shadows). He went into more depth about vertex shaders and fragment shaders, the GPU effects that make everything look a lot more real.
Ilmari gave examples of a few uses, including games, 3D bar charts and scatter graphs. He then started animating all of these, including a 10,000 point scattergraph that moved in real-time. Finally, he demonstrated a loader for Collada meshes (supported by Maya) and brought in a monster that with a few lines of code started walking around the screen.
Overall, it was a great introduction to the subject, one worth a lot more of your time.