Babylon JS Day 3
Today I covered chapters five and six of the Babylon JS Getting Started guide. These chapter gave me a quick tour around some of the environmental features of Babylon JS. Notable items include
- Ground planes/objects can be created with grayscale heightmaps. I’ve done this in Unity a few times. Nice to know this is available to me in Babylon.
- Building skyboxes from images seems like sort of a nuisance. It’s good to know how to do this but most of the projects I want to build will use simple color or gradient skyboxes.
- Babylon JS supports using sprites in 3D scenes as a type of billboard object. These will always face the camera. While this looks great in 3D scenes on desktop or mobile, these always look bad to me when I see them in VR.
- Babylon JS has a nifty particle system. I could easily get lost with a feature like this and spend a great deal of time working on nothing but particles. Perhaps I’ll make one of my Friday Projects based around particles…
- Bonus: I learned about another advanced modeling method called
CreateLathe. You pass it an array of Vector3 points (along the same z plane) and it will create a 3D object. Super cool! I’ve used stuff like this in Blender before but to see this happen with just a few lines of JavaScript blew my mind.