This is actually tricky due to multimaterials and vertex normals.
The practical effects of "shading" parameter in WebGLRenderer are currently following:
- if your model has vertex normals, now you can "dumb down" its shading by specifying THREE.FlatShading for MeshLambertMaterial and MeshPhongMaterial
- if your model has only face normals, it will always have just flat shading, no matter which shading you set, no escape from this
- if your model has multiple materials, smooth shading always "wins", meaning if there is at least one smooth shaded material in multimaterial group, all other materials in this group will be also smooth shaded (this is solvable by having multiple normal buffers, but seems wasteful, at least for the moment, till there are no practical use cases)
Currently implemented shading / material combinations:
- MeshNormalMaterial: FlatShading [default], GouradShading
- MeshDepthMaterial: no shading parameter in material, uses own specific shading
- MeshBasicMaterial: no shading parameter in material, uses own specific shading
- MeshLambertMaterial: FlatShading, GouraudShading [default]
- MeshPhongMaterial: FlatShading, PhongShading [default]
It's commented out, as it breaks shader validation in current Chrome :(.
There seems to be some bug in Chrome / ANGLE making it barf when using "gl_FragCoord" in fragment shader.
Curiously, while it breaks both 9.0.576.0 dev channel and latest continuous build 9.0.583.0, it does work fine in canary build with the same version as dev channel (9.0.576.0).
Go figure. Also in Firefox 4 beta 7 it works fine.
It seems there were some recent changes in handling of "gl_FragCoord" on Windows which probably broke something when fixing other bug:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=59762http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/issues/detail?id=71
TODO: make isolated test case and submit bug report (if this doesn't go away in next Chrome update).
Not all features from the new material format are implemented yet, though already now it's more powerful than the old format (you can now use texture also in Basic and Phong materials).
Also started to retire old model format: removed old OBJ converter and meshes that it generated.
TODO:
- take into account shading and blending parameters
- transplant cube map support from experimental material
Almost done porting CanvasRenderer to the new material system (plus some performance gains on the way :D)
`Color` now handles hex with no alpha byte (probably there is a nicer way of doing it...)
If you want to use binary format, convert OBJ models using "convert_obj_threejs_slim.py" with "-t binary" option.
This will now create two files:
JS part with materials
BIN part with binary buffers
Binary models are loaded like this:
loader.loadBinary( 'obj/lucy/Lucy250k_bin.js', function( geometry ) { createScene( geometry, s ) }, "obj/lucy" );
(difference to ascii format is that url root must be always specified so loader can find binary buffers file, like it already was for textures)
Good news:
- raw binary files are quite smaller than raw ascii files (about half size)
- loading times went down about 20-25%
- now also Firefox can handle 250k triangle mesh (it just bugs about long running script), with ascii format it threw "array initialiser too large" exception
Mixed news:
- gzipped binary files are only about 25% smaller than gzipped ascii files so actual benefits are smaller,
also it's more likely server will have JS gzipping on by default, while you need to set it up for
other formats (could be hacked around by naming binary files with JS extension instead of BIN?)
Bad news:
- browser blocking is back :( Not that it ever went completely away (for large models object creation is more costly than loading and it is blocking), but it was slightly better with ascii loader (where data is loaded as worker's JS body).
- this comes from having to use Ajax to load binary data
- loading binary data by Ajax from within worker didn't really help, it was in fact slightly slower and browser did freeze :(
- can't easily embed binary data in JSON (would need to encode it which would make it bigger, defying the purpose)
- Loader got fatter
Also in this commit: renamed Loader.loadAsync() => Loader.loadAsciiOld() and Loader.loadWorker() = Loader.loadAscii() so that names correspond to model formats instead of underlying implementation.
loadAsciiOld - JS exported by Blender and old OBJ converter
loadAscii - JSON created by slim OBJ converter (-t ascii)
loadBinary - JSON + BIN created by slim OBJ converter (-t binary)
TODO:
- look into UV coordinates, should be indexed the same way as vertices, normals and faces are (instead of unrolled per each face)
- look into HTML5 File API, binary blobs could help
The idea is that later there will be more loaders which would load different formats (like OBJLoader, ColladaLoader).
Usage (async JS):
var loader = new THREE.Loader();
loader.loadAsync( "obj/torus/Torus.js", function() { createScene( new Torus() ) } );
Usage (web worker):
var loader = new THREE.Loader();
loader.loadWorker( "obj/torus/Torus_slim.js", function( geometry ) { createScene( geometry ) } );
Web worker loader is useful for large meshes, where it allows browser to stay responsive for longer time and also it can handle larger meshes than async JS loader.
Web worker loader needs a simpler format of the model. Web workers can communicate with the main application only via message passing, where messages are JSON objects.
There is a new version of OBJ -> Three.js converter (convert_obj_threejs_slim.py) which can produce model in format needed for web workers.
All examples which were using models from OBJ converter were refactored to use Loader.
Except large mesh example, all examples are using just async JS loading. Web worker loading is there, it's just commented out, as it's a bit pain for local development.
Chrome doesn't allow to run web workers from pages accessed via file://, so you need either to run it with "--allow-file-access-from-files" flag, or access examples via local server (http://localhost/example.html).
Mr.doob
alteredq