Mike Ton

Been checking out WebGL as part of my more recent Saturday Morning Project.  And as far as I can surmise, WebGL seems to be an interface that exposes GPU hardware buffers to the browser. And javascript in this context, is basically utilized to push floating-point values to vertex buffers, and shuttling them through the C(?) foreign-function interface into the GL library.

Here's the current code state of my fiddling  with a simple, bare bones WebGL context:

https://github.com/miketon/webGL

Here's a mindmap of my current understanding OpenGL functions and hardware registers:

http://www.mindomo.com/view.htm?m=fe720acc4ba34b7bb49c8524b427c768

There's a lot to love about the how graphics development on the web is trending.  It feels like a reset/re-invention of the industry ~10 years ago.

Nintendo characters tend to emphasize shape and volume over details.  In addition to value attenuation, a complementary amount of hue shifting can really emphasize the simplicity and beauty of this style.  And the shaders I've adapted from this approach can run on a wide set of hardware from fixed pipeline mobile devices to highly programmable CGFX/HLSL environments.  Normals are fundamentally one's best friend for getting high mileage here<g>.