Graphics have been a blind spot for me for pretty much my entire career. I more or less failed upward into where I am now (which ended up being a lot of data and distributed stuff). I do enjoy doing what I do and I think I'm reasonably good at it so it's hardly a "bad" thing, but I (like I think a lot of people here) got into programming because I wanted to make games.
Outside of playing with OpenGL as a teenager to make a planet orbit around a sun, a bad space invaders clone in Flash where you shoot a bird pooping on you, a really crappy Breakout clone with Racket, and the occasional experiments with Vulkan and Metal, I never really have fulfilled the dream of being the next John Carmack or Tim Sweeney.
Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up. I suspect it's because I don't really understand the fundamentals well enough, and as a result jumping into Vulkan I end up metaphorically "drinking from a firehose". I certainly hope this doesn't happen, but if I manage to become unemployed again maybe that could be a good excuse to finally buckle down and try and learn this.
The website has come a long way, a good reminder for Santa to drop a donation.
Computer graphics needs more open education for sure. Traditional techniques are sealed in old books you have to go out of your way and find; Sergei Savchenko's "3D Graphics Programming Games and Beyond" is a good one. New techniques are often behind proprietary gates, with shallow papers and slides that only give a hint of how things may work. Graphics APIs, especially modern ones, make things more confusing than they need to be too. I think writing software rasterizers and ray tracers is a good starting point; forget GPUs exist.
Also, slight tangent, but there doesn't seem to be any contact method here other than Discord, which I find to be an immediate turn-off. Last time I checked, it required a phone number.
The donations page could use a link directly from the homepage too.
Yeah, that's "the mouse book" in my mind. The tiger book is also a very good compilation of topics, though it leaves things as "exercise for the reader" more often than I would like to.
Graphics have been a blind spot for me for pretty much my entire career. I more or less failed upward into where I am now (which ended up being a lot of data and distributed stuff). I do enjoy doing what I do and I think I'm reasonably good at it so it's hardly a "bad" thing, but I (like I think a lot of people here) got into programming because I wanted to make games.
Outside of playing with OpenGL as a teenager to make a planet orbit around a sun, a bad space invaders clone in Flash where you shoot a bird pooping on you, a really crappy Breakout clone with Racket, and the occasional experiments with Vulkan and Metal, I never really have fulfilled the dream of being the next John Carmack or Tim Sweeney.
Every time I try and learn Vulkan I end up getting confused and annoyed about how much code I need to write and give up. I suspect it's because I don't really understand the fundamentals well enough, and as a result jumping into Vulkan I end up metaphorically "drinking from a firehose". I certainly hope this doesn't happen, but if I manage to become unemployed again maybe that could be a good excuse to finally buckle down and try and learn this.
Try WebGL or better, WebGPU. It's so much easier and all the concepts you learn are applicable to other APIs.
https://webgpufundamentals.org
or
https://webgl2fundamentals.org
I'd choose webgpu over webgl2 as it more closely resembles current mondern graphics APIs like Metal, DirectX12, Vulkan.
The website has come a long way, a good reminder for Santa to drop a donation.
Computer graphics needs more open education for sure. Traditional techniques are sealed in old books you have to go out of your way and find; Sergei Savchenko's "3D Graphics Programming Games and Beyond" is a good one. New techniques are often behind proprietary gates, with shallow papers and slides that only give a hint of how things may work. Graphics APIs, especially modern ones, make things more confusing than they need to be too. I think writing software rasterizers and ray tracers is a good starting point; forget GPUs exist.
Also, slight tangent, but there doesn't seem to be any contact method here other than Discord, which I find to be an immediate turn-off. Last time I checked, it required a phone number.
The donations page could use a link directly from the homepage too.
I can still remember a fellow student wanting to know how to write a 3D computer game, the professor being stumped, and my chiming in w/
>Get Foley & Van Dam from the library
noting it should be available to check out, since I'd just checked it back in.
Several new editions since:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5257044-computer-graphic...
Yeah, that's "the mouse book" in my mind. The tiger book is also a very good compilation of topics, though it leaves things as "exercise for the reader" more often than I would like to.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1933732.Fundamentals_of_...