Re:WebGL Tutorial: Rendering Wavefront 3D Models
by greggman on Sunday December 11, 2016 @01:06PM
(#13152210)
THREE.js is awesome but it is not WebGL. It's a 3D Library that happens to use WebGL (and can use other backends as well).
If you want to learn WebGL itself try http://webglfundamentals.org
If you just want to get 3D on your page without having to learn WebGL use THREE.js
Re:WebGL Tutorial: Rendering Wavefront 3D Models
by chinedufn on Sunday December 11, 2016 @04:10PM
(#13153245)
Great points, along with greggman's http://webglfundamentals.org I'd also recommend http://http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217
---
So I'm fond of the idea of being able to quickly get up and running with small modules, hence me working on things like this. Totally hear and agree with you on most of the WebGL being "hidden" here.
I hope to work on more tutorials that dive into how the sausage is made, but for now you can look at the implementation on GitHub -> https://github.com/chinedufn/load-wavefront-obj
The problem with this tutorial is that almost all of it is hidden behind an opaque "loadWFObj", so you don't get the critical aha moments of "wait so the model is just a bunch of 3d triplets?", "whoa every camera is just a 4x4 matrix you multiply by", and "shaders are a C program that runs on a pixel".
I promise you'll pick up all of these things naturally by fiddling around with THREE.js. But, you probably won't get there by copying a WebGL context initialization example that does everything interesting inside an opaque library.