21–30 of 30 posts
I’ve always wanted to get into graphical programming but I always get hung up on creating anything. Shaders feel like black magic to me. And the tutorials are spread across many different technologies and techniques that it’s hard to determine where you should start.
I’ve always wanted to get into graphical programming but I always get hung up on creating anything. Shaders feel like black magic to me. And the tutorials are spread across many different technologies and techniques that it’s hard to determine where you should start.
I’ve always wanted to get into graphical programming but I always get hung up on creating anything. Shaders feel like black magic to me. And the tutorials are spread across many different technologies and techniques that it’s hard to determine where you should start.
Sounds like what Shadertoy was built for-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDxAnguEOn8
I’ve always wanted to get into graphical programming but I always get hung up on creating anything. Shaders feel like black magic to me. And the tutorials are spread across many different technologies and techniques that it’s hard to determine where you should start.
Sounds like what Shadertoy was built for-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDxAnguEOn8
Shadertoy can be fun and you can learn lots of techniques and lots of math but you aren't learning graphics
I’ve always wanted to get into graphical programming but I always get hung up on creating anything. Shaders feel like black magic to me. And the tutorials are spread across many different technologies and techniques that it’s hard to determine where you should start.
Build a raytracer from scratch. It's a couple hundred lines of very straightforward C code, or much, much less with a higher level language. You will learn _a ton_ about the rendering pipeline, transformations, lighting, shading surfaces, etc. It is super satisfying the very first time you run and finally get some colorful shaded spheres floating in space--you'll remember that moment for a long time. This is just one…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you want to make! Starting with a software renderer is nuts. Start with unity, make an unlit shader, start doing basic effects (in colours, then using texture samples) using uv coordinates. (In frag, ignore vertexes to start with). Just remember youre just colouring a pixel, on a bit of a surface.
> Starting with a software renderer is nuts. No, not really. You can write a simplistic ray tracer and rasterizer in about 10 - 50 lines tops: https://github.com/d26900/JamaisVu/blob/main/tests.c Lines 66 - 91. The result/screenshot: https://github.com/d26900/JamaisVu If this is "nuts", then so be it. Let me be nuts. :P
The OP already cited shaders as one avenue, and shaders are so so easy to get immediate results from; as opposed to making a small mistake in a path tracer and spending hours debugging why your screen just shows one colour.
Need to debug where youve gone wrong with a shader? Return float4(uv,0,1) and its working again.
I’ve always wanted to get into graphical programming but I always get hung up on creating anything. Shaders feel like black magic to me. And the tutorials are spread across many different technologies and techniques that it’s hard to determine where you should start.
A very general piece of advice: Try to find a small and unusually talented team doing what you want to learn, and get hired by them. There is no substitute to learning from smart/experienced people. (This is after learning the basics + the intermediate stuff.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like what Shadertoy was built for-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDxAnguEOn8
Shadertoy is the absolute worst way to learn graphics. It's a puzzle designed for experts to show they can pass the puzzle. Production graphics almost never use those techniques. Production graphics don't limit themselves to fragment shaders and 1 draw call and no vertices. Production graphics run at 60 fps full screen where as shadertoy graphics almost never run at 60fps even in their tiny display. Shadertoy can be…
Usually I teach the OpenGL pipeline in one session, but students have a lot of things to understand: Vertex shader has its own things to learn and without the fragment shader you do not see what you are doing. In the following lessons I dig into the details of each part independently. This approach works, but it requires a lot of abstraction from the beginnings and a lot of code to have trivial applications. Furthermore, it introduce latency in understanding the whole pipeline, they do not really 'get' why we have this pipeline and what each bloc does inside of it. Only after a few lessons, when they have all the pieces, everything clicks.
This year I tried another approach: I used at the first lesson exclusively ShaderToys with progressive exercices, the students were very happy to be able to create content directly and eagerly digged into the details by themselves. Naturally, as wanted, they felt the issue of not being able to create simple objects like a 3D cube and move in 3D.
The second lesson was then the perfect time to show the whole pipeline and the vertex shader was an almost obvious need!
Another change I made this year was switching from C++ to Javascript, I'm not yet sure which solution is the best. They both have advantages and drawbacks to learn OpenGL/WebGL.
I’ve always wanted to get into graphical programming but I always get hung up on creating anything. Shaders feel like black magic to me. And the tutorials are spread across many different technologies and techniques that it’s hard to determine where you should start.
Build a raytracer from scratch. It's a couple hundred lines of very straightforward C code, or much, much less with a higher level language. You will learn _a ton_ about the rendering pipeline, transformations, lighting, shading surfaces, etc. It is super satisfying the very first time you run and finally get some colorful shaded spheres floating in space--you'll remember that moment for a long time. This is just one…
Or a business card's worth of space:
https://fabiensanglard.net/rayTracing_back_of_business_card/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very general piece of advice: Try to find a small and unusually talented team doing what you want to learn, and get hired by them. There is no substitute to learning from smart/experienced people. (This is after learning the basics + the intermediate stuff.)
This sounds like great advice that's very difficult to follow. How do you find a small and unusually talented team? And if you don't yet have the required skills, how do you get hired by them?