PicoGL.js

PicoGL.js is a minimal WebGL 2 rendering library. It's meant for developers who understand the WebGL 2 rendering pipeline and want to use it, but with a more convenient API. Typical usage of PicoGL.js will involve creating programs, vertex buffers, vertex arrays, uniform buffers, framebuffers, textures, transform feedbacks, and combining them into draw calls.

// Create a PicoGL.js app to manage GL state. let app = PicoGL.createApp(canvas) .clearColor(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0); // Create program from shader source. // Shaders are compiled in parallel if supported by the platform. app.createPrograms([vertexShaderSource, fragmentShaderSource]).then(([program]) => { // Scene geometry stored vertex buffer object. let positions = app.createVertexBuffer(PicoGL.FLOAT, 2, new Float32Array([ -0.5, -0.5, 0.5, -0.5, 0.0, 0.5 ])); // Vertex buffer and attribute pointer state stored // in vertex array object. let vertexArray = app.createVertexArray() .vertexAttributeBuffer(0, positions); // Scene data stored in uniform buffer object. let uniformBuffer = app.createUniformBuffer([ PicoGL.FLOAT_VEC4, PicoGL.FLOAT_VEC4 ]) .set(0, new Float32Array([1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.3])) .set(1, new Float32Array([0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.7])) .update(); // Create a draw call from program, vertex array, uniform buffer. let drawCall = app.createDrawCall(program, vertexArray) .uniformBlock("ColorUniforms", uniformBuffer); // Draw! app.clear() drawCall.draw(); });

PicoGL.js can be used directly by downloading the built source and loading it via a script tag:

<script src="js/picogl.min.js"></script>

or it can be installed via npm

npm install picogl

and loaded via ES6-style import :

import PicoGL from "picogl";

Note that PicoGL.js is not a scene graph library. There are no objects, hierarchies, transforms, materials, etc. It has been designed only to make management of GPU state more convenient. Its conceptual model maps fairly directly to the constructs one deals with when writing directly with the WebGL 2 API. The only higher-level construct is the draw call, which manages sets of related lower-level constructs.

Basic Examples

Advanced Examples

Benchmarks