How to Create the Apple Fifth Avenue Cube in WebGL (opens in new tab)

Isn't WebGL a fairly direct wrapper over OpenGL ES? The basics get you up to speed with the JS take on this otherwise standard (and very old) API, particularly integrating with the DOM and Web Workers. After that, any OpenGL book or tutorial series should do for the rest.

An extremely good resource (IMO) for 3D graphics in general is Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming (https://paroj.github.io/gltut/). I believe that's a slightly updated version; the original author of the base text goes by Nicol Bolas on SE (https://stackoverflow.com/users/734069/nicol-bolas). Note that it uses (I think?) OpenGL 3.3, which is a bit dated at this point. However, the focus of the text is on programmable pipelines and generalized 3D graphics concepts. I've found it to be a tremendously useful resource overall.

Regarding API versions and documentation, note that WebGL 2.0 matches OpenGL ES 3.0, which is in turn compatible with OpenGL 4.3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL_ES#OpenGL_ES_3.0). (Did I mention it's an old API?)

As always, consult:

* The ever excellent Mozilla documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGL_API#G...).

* The relevant Khronos API registry (https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL-Refpages/es3.0/).

* The relevant Khronos specifications (https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL/index_es.php#specs3).

Edit: I almost forgot, Song Ho Ahn (http://www.songho.ca/opengl/) is an ever indispensable reference for graphics related math and diagrams.

I'd recommend https://webglfundamentals.org at least as a starting place

As for using OpenGL ES references, there are enough differences what I wouldn't recommend that route. 85% or 95% of the info will be similar but WebGL has a bunch of minor gotchas and changes to the spec to make it secure and consistent and those ways will be no fun to discover when you're copying code from a C or C++ OpenGL ES example.

Maybe https://hordes.io/

OpenGL (which WebGL is a sister API of) is a relatively obnoxious API to work with, requiring lots of calls to set an maintain state, as well as pick which state you're working with for a give call. (conceptually you can think of there as being a bunch of static variables that point to the current state for a call). This is IMO one of the biggest barriers to OpenGL, although I believe they've made some of this more explicit than it used to be.

It looks like this API aims to keep the same abstraction level as OpenGLs API, but without the state management required.

So this won't allow you to go straight to OpenGL, but it will teach you the concepts and objects you use with OpenGL.

One of my favorite tutorials and references for learning graphics concepts is http://learnwebgl.brown37.net/.

This is the opposite problem of why I enjoyed the article! I understand why they used Regl (as they say, it's because WebGL is ludicrously verbose)... so the article was great for me as someone comfortable with the the very basic basics!

If you're just getting started and want to do it from completely from scratch, then https://webglfundamentals.org (or https://webgl2fundamentals.org - though I'm starting to fear WebGL2 is not getting as much traction as it should... is it dead?!) is the place to go. This site is really fantastic at explaining what all the boilerplate is actually doing.

Really, it's more a tutorial on rendering algorithms than it is about WebGL per se. There are lots of tutorials out there where you can look up the minutiae of how to set up a canvas, clear the framebuffer and set up a rendering loop. This is about how to draw stuff using fragment shaders in a non-trivial (but still pleasingly simple!) way.

There is comparatively little content for that -- most of it gets sucked down into the mathematics of bump mapping or discussions about stencil buffer precision. I rather liked it.

GL was written in the early 90s with a late 80s / early 90s programming context in mind. It's essentially a giant state machine with some limited programmability bolted on in later additions. It feels really clunky compared to modern frameworks.

I think anyone interested in it should find a basic WebGL tutorial and render some triangles and cubes with vertex coloring and some texture mapping to see how it's done in WebGL and to see how tedious it can be. Having to change a lot of different pieces of state every render call to do what seems like very basic things (is there anything more basic than rendering a triangle?) gets old quick.