Learn computer graphics from scratch and for free

(scratchapixel.com)

76 points | by theusus 9 hours ago

2 comments

  • yunnpp 1 hour ago
    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.

  • tombert 36 minutes ago
    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.

    • weslleyskah 20 minutes ago
      I feel the same. I was trying to make some "art" with shaders.

      I've got inspired by Zbrush and Maya, but I don't think I can learn what is necessary to build even a small clone of these gigantic pieces of software, unless I work with this on a day to day basis.

      The performance of Zbrush is so insane... it is mesmerizing. I don't think I can go deep into this while treading university.

    • socalgal2 27 minutes ago
      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.

      • tombert 2 minutes ago
        Yeah you're not the first one to mention that to me. I'll probably try WebGPU or wgpu next time I decide to learn graphics. I'd probably have more fun with it than Vulkan.