What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started, covers the basic recipes that you can use when you create new Three.js-based applications. We'll show you how you can set up a basic Three.js skeleton using any of the available Three.js renderers. We'll further show you WebGL detection, loading resources, setting up an animation loop, adding drag and drop support, and controlling your scene through the keyboard.
Chapter 2, Geometries and Meshes, shows you a number of recipes that focus on creating, working with and manipulating geometries and meshes. We'll go into detail on how to rotate meshes in different ways, manipulate them using matrix transformations, generate geometries programmatically, and load models from Blender and in other formats.
Chapter 3, Working with the Camera, focuses on recipes that manipulate the cameras available in Three.js. It shows you how to work with the perspective and the orthogonal camera. This chapter also shows you recipes that explain how to rotate a camera, center a camera, and follow objects around.
Chapter 4, Materials and Textures, contains recipes that explain how to get good results working with the materials provided by Three.js. It has recipes on transparency, reflections, UV mapping, face materials, bump and normal maps and also explains how the various blend modes work.
Chapter 5, Lights and Custom Shaders, has recipes that deal with the workings of the different light sources in Three.js and shows you how to work with WebGL shaders. It shows you how to correctly set up shadows, create a sun-like lighting source, and goes into the differences between spot lights, point lights, and directional lights. In this chapter, we'll also provide you with a couple of recipes that explain how to create a custom vertex shader and a custom fragment shader.
Chapter 6, Point Clouds and Postprocessing, provides you with recipes that show you how to set up postprocessing. With postprocessing, you can enhance your scene with blurring, coloring, or other types of effects. This chapter also contains recipes that explain features of a particle system, such as animation and particle materials.
Chapter 7, Animation and Physics, shows you a number of recipes that help you in animating the objects in your scene and show you how to add physics (such as gravity and collision detection) to your scene.
