Book Review: WebGL: Up and Running

Book cover with the tonyBot (in running mode) superimposed

I have just finished my first reading of WebGL: Up and Running written by Tony Parisi.

Note and disclaimer: The author is my very good friend. I prepared demonstration material for the book. Tony mentions me by name three times in the book in glowing terms. Therefore you can assume that my point of view is not particularly neutral. On the contrary I am definitely biased in favor of Tony and his work.

Three.js 3D in Blogger ~ Now with Animation

This is day two of 3D blogging and the 3D is improving. As you can see (I hope) data can now be animated.

The idea is to be able to display 3D animations created using Three.js in Blogger headers and posts and, well, anywhere on the page.

So let's see how it's done.

Giving Jaanga A Little 3D Love

In the top right hand corner, there is a colored spinning cube. If you cannot see it, the your browser does not support WebGL.

If you can see it, then welcome to my new little 3D happy bloggy thing!

3D on the web is still a very new thing. Even web sites that are deeply involved and engaged with 3D tend to be mostly 2D based.

The current poplar standard for 3D in your browser is WebGL. WebGL is maintained by the Khronos Group.  You will have to dig quite deeply to find some 3D there.

Have a look at webgl.com, learningwebgl.com and learningthreejs.com. These sites show you images and videos of 3D but do not actually publish 3D in there posts.

So, hey people, get with the program!

If mrdoob.com can do it all in 3D so can all of us.

Jaanga - Now a GitHub Organization

The process of moving Jaanga files from my personal GitHub repository to their own repository on GitHub has begun. Jaanga is now an official GitHub 'organization'. See:

https://github.com/jaanga

This means that ownership of the project can now belong to a number of people and not just to a single individual (me in this case). I urge anybody that wants full collaboration and an ongoing existence for their open-source project to consider moving their project to an organization. It's easy to do.

In moving the project to its own pages, I have - of course - made the source code public. And, I have also made demos that work available using the GitHub gh-pages branch

http://jaanga.github.com

New Wikipedia article for Three.js up for a while and not deleted

Please have a look at:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three.js

Proposed New Three.js Article for Wikipedia

The article for Three.js in Wikipedia no longer exists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three.js

The 'talk' on the topic of deleting the page (now closed) may be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Three.js

From past experience, rather than argue with the deletionists, a better strategy is to write an entry that is too good to delete. Once the Wikipedia deletionists are on your case, you have to write the way Wikipedia wants you to write - and that way is not always obvious, often involves complexities and and is time-consuming.

Nevetheless, it would probably be worth the effort for Three.js to get its Wikipedia page back.

How to Make Animated Peeps #5 ~ Three.js & Conclusions

Screen capture of  'Kurt' - an animated 3D character in Three.js

Demo: http://theo-armour.github.com/threo.js/animated-peeps/tutor/index.html
Source code: https://github.com/theo-armour/threo.js/tree/gh-pages/animated-peeps/tutor


Posts in the tutorial:
jaanga: How to Make Animated Peeps #1 ~ Demo & Intro
jaanga: How to Make Animated Peeps #2 ~ MakeHuman
jaanga: How to Make Animated Peeps #3 ~ MoCap & BVhacker
jaanga: How to Make Animated Peeps #4 ~ Blender
jaanga: How to Make Animated Peeps #5 ~ Three.js & Conclusions


In this fifth and final post of the tutorials on how to make animated peeps that display in Three.js, you will load the character named 'Kurt' into Three.js and watch him strut his stuff. There just a few tasks left to do.

How to Make Animated Peeps #4 ~ Blender

Screen capture of the Blender program

This is the fourth in a series of tutorials designed to help you build animated 3D characters in a matter of minutes. It is taking me much, much longer to write these tutorials then it did to make my first demo that finishes with eight characters dancing about.

By now you should have a character model in an MHX file and a MoCap BVH file. Now we want to use Blender to combine the two and export them so that they can be displayed in your browser using Three.js.

How to Make Animated Peeps #3 ~ MoCap & BVhacker

Screen capture of the BVhacker program

This is the third in a series of tutorials that guide you through the process of sourcing and using applications that enable you to create 3D animated characters visible in most (but not all) modern web browsers. The ambition is to show you how you can create a demo of a character with a suitable motion in a matter of minutes.