You're reading from Learning Three.js: The JavaScript 3D Library for WebGL - Second Edition Create stunning 3D graphics in your browser using the Three.js JavaScript library

Product type Paperback

Published in Mar 2015

Publisher

ISBN-13 9781784392215

Length 422 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

JavaScript

Tools

Three.js

Concepts

Data Visualization

Author (1):

Jos Dirksen

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Table of Contents (14) Chapters

Preface

1. Creating Your First 3D Scene with Three.js

2. Basic Components That Make Up a Three.js Scene FREE CHAPTER

3. Working with the Different Light Sources Available in Three.js

4. Working with Three.js Materials

5. Learning to Work with Geometries

6. Advanced Geometries and Binary Operations

7. Particles, Sprites, and the Point Cloud

8. Creating and Loading Advanced Meshes and Geometries

9. Animations and Moving the Camera

10. Loading and Working with Textures

11. Custom Shaders and Render Postprocessing

12. Adding Physics and Sounds to Your Scene

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.