BabylonJS - Overview

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BabylonJS is an open sourceJavascript framework for building 3D games with HTML5 and WEBGL.It is hosted on github.The official web site of BabylonJS is www.babylonjs.com.

In the world of 3D Animation,the shapes are drawn with triangles.With WebGL, the complexity increases with the deluge of coding that is involved in the process. BabylonJS is the easy solution that pitches in to mitigate the increased complexity. Here, the API for lights, cameras, engine are easy to handle and to create 3D objects.

The source code of babylonJS is coded in typescript.It is compiled to Javascript and made available tothe end user.

To start working with Babylonjs, download the babylonjs file, host it at your end and you are ready to get started to write your 3D code.

BabylonJS is developed by Microsoft employees in the year 2016.David Catuhe, a Principal Program Manager for the Window & Devices Group at Microsoft is the main person behind developing BabylonJs and making it a big success.

To run BabylonJS, we need modern browsers with WEBGL support. Latest browsers i.e Internet Explorer 11+, Firefox 4+, Google Chrome 9+, Opera 15+, etc. does have WEBGL support and the demos can be executed on same to see the output.

BabylonJs offers following features which help to create different types of 3D-scenes −

  • Shapes like box, sphere, scylinder, cone, height ground
  • Cameras, Lights
  • Meshes, textures, Materials
  • Sprites
  • Morphing
  • Mesh Intersection and collision detection
  • Physics engine plug-in
  • Action Manager
  • SolidParticles
  • Instances and Particles
  • Support for Bones and Skeletons
  • Adding music and sound to the scene

In addition to its own meshes, BabylonJS also allows the use of meshes created from third party 3D softwares like Blender, FBX and 3DS Max.

Blender

Blender is an open-source 3D computer graphics software product used to create animated scenes, 3D printed models, video games, etc. Blender gives. bablyon files which are to be used with Babylon to render meshes. How to convert files from blender to babylon is explained in subsequent chapters of this tutorial.

FBX

Also called the filmbox, it helps with 3D animation and texture painting software. The FBX files are saved with the.fbx extension.

MAX

The MAX software helps you in creating massive world in games, stunning scenes for designs and engaging virtual reality experiences.

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