WebGL Beginner's Guide

Structure of a WebGL application

As in any 3D graphics library, in WebGL, you need certain components to be present to create a 3D scene. These fundamental elements will be covered in the first four chapters of the book. Starting from Chapter 5, Action, we will cover elements that are not required to have a working 3D scene such as colors and textures and then later on we will move to more advanced topics.

The components we are referring to are as follows:

• Canvas: It is the placeholder where the scene will be rendered. It is a standard HTML5 element and as such, it can be accessed using the Document Object Model (DOM) through JavaScript.
• Objects: These are the 3D entities that make up part of the scene. These entities are composed of triangles. In ...