Chapter 3. Lights!

In WebGL, we make use of the vertex and fragment shaders to create a lighting model for our scene. Shaders allow us to define a mathematical model that governs how our scene is lit. We will study different algorithms and see examples about their implementation.

A basic knowledge of linear algebra will be really useful to help you understand the contents of this chapter. We will use glMatrix, a JavaScript library that handles most of the vector and matrix operation, so you do not need to worry about the details. Nonetheless, it is paramount to have a conceptual understanding of the linear algebra operations that we will discuss.

In this chapter, we will:

• Learn about light sources, normals, and materials

• Learn the difference between shading and lighting

• Use the Goraud and Phong shading methods, and the Lambertian and Phong lighting models

• Define and use uniforms, attributes, and varyings

• Work with ESSL, the shading language for WebGL

• Discuss relevant WebGL API methods that relate...