101–110 of 251 posts
Good article on color management in general, which has a great intersection with foundations needed for graphics programming: https://chrisbrejon.com/cg-cinematography/chapter-1-color-ma...
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I really dislike people that got into a thing and then try to discourage others. “Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life” which is bullshit from a jaded person that lost passion. Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack. So here’s another perspective. If all you have done is web apps and Kubernetes, for example, do get into graphics programming. The feedbac…
> I really dislike people that got into a thing and then try to discourage others. “Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life” which is bullshit from a jaded person that lost passion. Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack. Given that almost everyone who wants to be a "graphics programmer" is also somehow gaming industry adjacent, it is extremely fair to war…
Actually, no. Autodesk acquired Alias, and got the Maya animation system, in 2005. Soon after, the CAD tools had cinematic quality output. The architectural people loved this - good looking, accurate architectural renders came out. They especially liked that lighting worked, and you could use the CAD system to place real-world light fixtures.
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> Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life That's not the argument being made here. The field is changing. I had a good career in graphics, my life wasn't wasted at all. That doesn't mean a college student would have the same experience starting today.
Getting into a field that is changing is the best time to get into that field. The playing field gets equalized and you have more opportunity to be established as a strong expert.
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> PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the covariance matrix Yes you're now the second person the literally repeat the same thing I've already stated extremely clearly and succinctly: PCA is not just rotation (hint: you also need to understand covariance). > I’m not sure why you’re both negative and dismissive. Transformation matrices in graphics are a good and approachable way to get used to linear transformations…
> My point is not that hard to understand. Have you done any serious graphics programming? Even at the OpenGL 1.x level? What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Just because you’re rotating and translating things in 3-space doesn’t negate that you have a stack of transforms that relate a point in world space to one on screen space and you want to be able to project from one to the other. Nor does it make it any e…
no it doesn't "negate", it's all completely orthogonal (pun) or irrelevant. like for real just please take a look at
https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/2.12/nn.html
and tell me which operators you're imagining have any resemblance with typical graphics linear algebra.
like when you people make such claims do you really have anything concrete in mind or just hype?
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Couldn't disagree more. I've only recently started digging into graphics programming and I've found it incredibly rewarding. It's the _one_ area of expertise that I don't yet have that has been preventing me from solo-developing a 3D game engine. It takes five minutes of trawling through the videos on the GDC Vault to see all of the clever and interesting ways modern graphics engineers are eking every bit of performa…
Well, then: "merry Christmas" so to say: https://flipcode.com/archives/
Today, I would not recommend anybody to go into graphics programming: I started in 2001, when NVidias first Geforce 1 ("the Gigatexl shadercard") was first announced: The field developed since then with so much speed and innovations, it blows my mind of. Compared to what we could do 25years ago, the tech today is just fu*ing impressive. Though, with this impressiveness comes a big "but": The space is developing at a…
Indeed "be a graphics programmer" nowadays sounds like "be an assembly programmer".
A kind of time waster for a nerd with too much time in their hands.
If you want to make games, use an existing engine. Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, and Bevy are good choices. You'll learn the higher level issues of graphics, not how to push pixels around. The real problem is making it fun.
If you want to do 3D engine programming, be aware that there are too many bad game engines. In Rust land, where I am, there are three failed renderers, one unfinished one, and the one inside the Bevy engine. Those are the major projects. There are many other "I'm going to build a game engine" projects. Building a game engine takes about two years to get to the My First Renderer point. Getting to big, highly detailed, dynamic scenes is a much bigger job. Be aware of the scale difference between the first demo and a useful engine.
If you want a job, be aware that the game industry sucks. Pay is lousy, hours are lousy, jobs end when the project is completed, and, like Hollywood, there's an army of wannabees wanting in. Also, right now, because of the collapse of the Metaverse thing, there's a glut of experienced people.
Then there's mobile. Everything is a cram job. Not enough screen, not enough compute, not enough GPU, not enough battery.
This is why most indy games now are 2D. That's do-able. Often in HTML/JavaScript.
Somewhat surprising there is no mention of basic design principles, or understanding the quirks of human perception. My brother was a production artist for some well-known computer games in the '90s-'00s, and continually complained about programmers and managers with zero visual sense, or curiosity about understanding the artists' side. Graphics aren't my specialty, but as a musician, sound designer and producer, by…
There’s a separate role that is more along the lines of what you’re saying, called a Technical Artist (that’s what I do) I think graphics programmers benefit from having an artistic mindset, but they usually work so low level that it isn’t necessary to be successful.
But I have no industry connection and my public portfolio is mostly charcoal and oil. The company that flew my drone animations is small & didn't get good video of them (there's a cellphone video or two from the audience, but that's not very good for a showreel). I've been thinking of just getting some good footage of a field & using blender to render & composite the designs, but doing that well will be time consuming and I feel like I might be better off doing something else.
Any advice on breaking in?
[0] I made a small blender workflow & add-on before AI to coordinate droneshow animations that I was selling to a small company, used renderdoc to insert gl.readcolors into the renderloop in a very ugly so I could get the benefit of the shader engine, which no commercial drone-animation software could do at the time. Almost worked for a bigger drone company but the contract was untenable.
Today, I would not recommend anybody to go into graphics programming: I started in 2001, when NVidias first Geforce 1 ("the Gigatexl shadercard") was first announced: The field developed since then with so much speed and innovations, it blows my mind of. Compared to what we could do 25years ago, the tech today is just fu*ing impressive. Though, with this impressiveness comes a big "but": The space is developing at a…
Maybe steering away from it is good advice for someone who's looking for a career transition but doesn't care about what they're actually doing. But that's not a good way to go through life; my advice to such a person would be to follow what they find interesting and valuable, and constantly challenge themselves to learn new things. Then deciding whether or not to learn computer graphics is relatively straightforward and it will be a net positive for the right kind of person. Even if they don't make it a career, the skills transfer well to many other areas.
Do you want to make games, or do 3D engine programming? If you want to make games, use an existing engine. Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot, and Bevy are good choices. You'll learn the higher level issues of graphics, not how to push pixels around. The real problem is making it fun. If you want to do 3D engine programming, be aware that there are too many bad game engines. In Rust land, where I am, there are three failed…
Also, think about tooling. Last time I wrote an engine from scratch, the tooling to support it probably took way more time than the engine did.