Parallax offset mapping with WebGL

Years ago I wrote a demo showcasing different normal mapping techniques with Delphi, but never got around cleaning up the source and releasing it. While working on my WebGL dungeon crawler prototype I dug out the old code, cleaned it up and ported it over to WebGL, so you don’t need a compiler to see it in action and play around with it. Parallax mapping uses an additional heightmap (together with a normal map) to add more depth to flat surfaces depending on the current camera angle. [Read More]
webgl 

Geometry instancing with WebGL 2

WebGL, based on OpenGL ES, brings hardware accelerated OpenGL to your browser, and version 2.0 is around the corner (specs). I’ve been playing around with WebGL (via JavaScript) for some time now (see my GitHub WebGL repo) and recently Google’s chrome (canary) got WebGL 2 support. WebGL 2.0 adds some interesting new features, with geometry instancing being one of them, so I sat down and wrote a small demo that shows how to render the same instance of a single mesh with differing shader attributes using instancing and only one drawcall : [Read More]
webgl 

2014 - Final posting

As another year ends, it’s time for a small retrospect. Next year marks the 10th anniversary of my personal blog, so I’ve been posting about my programming adventures for over a decade now (the first version of www.delphigl.de went online 2003 afair) and I’m still having lots of fun hacking code into different IDEs with different languages, though focus is shifting from time to time. And that’s actually what makes coding so much fun, it’s a constant learning progress that forces you to constantly sharpen your coding skills, learn new languages, adopt to new technologies etc. [Read More]