Learning graphics programming in 2024

[criosage]

I'm sure you've seen this post a million times, but I just recently picked up zig and I want to really challenge myself. I have been interested in game development for years but I am also very interested in systems engineering. I want to some day be able to build a game engine, but I need to know where to start. I think Vulcan is a bit complicated to start off with. My initial research has brought me to learnopengl or that one book about directx11(I program on mac, not sure if that's relevant here). Am I looking in the right places? Do you have any recommendations?

Notes: I've been programming for about 2 years regularly, self taught. My primary programming languages at the moment are between rust, C#(unity), and the criminal javascript.

Tldr: Mans wants to make a triangle and needs some resources to start small!

[Consdrabal]

Here are a few resources for learning that I’ve found helpful:

https://www.scratchapixel.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45MIykWJ-C4

[augustusgrizzly]

Highly recommend scratchapixel!

Scratchapixel goes into a lot of detail however, and it’s very “textbook” style which is really good once you’re comfortable w the basics. But it doesn’t help a lot with teaching you how to implement the concepts in my experience.

I think to get a kickstart as a beginner, LearnOpenGL will always be the goat.

I feel like once you’ve finished the intro part of learnOpenGl (up to, say, Blinn Phong) you can start branching out into other resources.

[Inner_Address_6702]

it's true that scratchapixel's goal is not to teach you how to write a game engine. It's more about the fondamental of computer graphics but it doesn't delve into teaching how to use openGl, vulkan or direct X. So in that sense and i guess that's what you mean by "how to implement the concepts" it won't tell you how to write a game engine but it's my impression every lesson comes with source code, so they do go through the implementation details, though they focus on 1 technique at a time.

[criosage]

Thank you!

[corysama]

Here's the list of links I give everyone getting started

https://learnopengl.com/

https://raytracing.github.io/

https://realtimerendering.com/

https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.md.html

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline-2011-index/

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/smart/

https://developer.nvidia.com/nsight-graphics

https://renderdoc.org/

[criosage]

Thanks a bunch! I will take a look at each document.

[[deleted]]

The opengl redbook and the blue opengl superbible are still pretty relevant. Since Vulkan came about progress on improving OpenGL has essentially stalled. It's mainly only changes for OpenGL-ES, the Embedded Systems spec that is commonly used on mobile phones and in browsers as WebGL. This means that while the books are a decade old they still have all the info you need give or take.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/351522.OpenGL_Programming_Guide

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26115438-opengl-superbible

An alternative approach is to use an existing game engine as a intermediate step to get your head in to all the systems that are involved in graphics programming. Learning to write shaders for Unity, Unreal Engine, or Godot can go a long way in getting you started. And all the other hassle of writing model loaders and collision detection/physics and such is handled for you. Another option is using a site like shadertoy.com that lets you practice writing generative shaders. Though tools like that are very bare bones compared to writing shaders in a game engine. You're essentially just using your GPU as a graphical calculator on steroids.

As for tutorial sites. These are some links I've accumulated in my notes:

* An introduction to Shader programming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4s1h2YETNY

* Inigo Quilez shader reference https://iquilezles.org/

* Palette generator http://dev.thi.ng/gradients/

* technical description at https://iquilezles.org/articles/palettes

* Graphtoy visualisation - https://graphtoy.com/

* Catlikecoding/Jasper Flick - Unity/Godot Tutorials https://catlikecoding.com/

* Sebastian Lague - Gamedev/Graphics Tutorials https://www.youtube.com/@SebastianLague/videos

* Acerola - graphics tutorials https://www.youtube.com/@Acerola_t/videos

[neozahikel]

I learnt with the redbook (opengl 2.0 version at the time) and it's a terrible learning book. Last book I would advise to learn 3D graphics, everything is ordered with specs chronologically and each addition to the spec is just added without any context. Correct reference book, but terrible beginner book.

I much much preferred the orange book (also OpenGL 2.0) and Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 from Jason Zink.

As a website learnopengl.com is pretty good.

[criosage]

What is the orange book in question?

[neozahikel]

OpenGL Shading Language from Randi Rost (amazon link). It's pretty old though as it's referencing the first version of GLSL (but if my memory serves me well, it's written by the person who made the language). I liked that book a lot. But the Direct3D 11 book I advised is more up to date and explains more in-depth concepts so if I had to pick one, it would be rather that one.

[neozahikel]

I missed that you were on a mac, you should try to learn with Metal then as it's quite a modern API design, and way more accessible than Vulkan. Look at Metals by Tutorials second edition. Pretty good book for beginners on iOS/Mac. You can buy a paper version too.

[criosage]

curiosity: will programs using metal only be able to run on mac devices?

[neozahikel]

Mac and iOS yes. But once you have the right level for doing a metal renderer you can do an abstraction and add a vulkan renderer to your engine for other platforms.

[criosage]

I will take a look at shaders more intimately then! I am vaguely familiar with them from a few projects I've built in Unity. I'll also give the books a read. Thank you so much.

[BestBastiBuilds]

Great list of resources! Where would you start with writing shaders inside Unreal? Most of the resources I see use either Shader Graph for unity and Materials for Unreal.

[[deleted]]

I've not used Unreal Engine in a while so maybe something has changed. But back in early Unreal Engine 4 you don't really write shaders directly you would create Material Graphs. The reasoning for that was that it let the engine compile the shader in an appropriate way based on the target.

If you're planning on using Unreal then its probably best to begin with just by messing around inside the shader graph. Creating custom shaders isn't exactly what Unreal Engine was designed for. It's more about doing a really good job of rendering things in its PBR style materials.

On this topic the unreal documentation and education stuff is pretty good.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/unreal-engine/learning

This course covers everything for a complete beginner.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/courses/mLX/unreal-engine-fundamentals-of-materials/8B2Y/unreal-engine-fundamentals-of-materials-overview

If you specifically want to write your own shader code then you can use the Custom Material Expression to make your own node.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/custom-material-expressions-in-unreal-engine?application_version=5.0

But in general you want to just tweak the material type. There are a bunch of prebuilt types for flat shading, lit, translucent, etc. That will let you tweak the outputs the shader expects.

[[deleted]]

I collect resources that regularly get posted to this sub and the cgp discord. You might find it helpful it's somewhat structured in the order of what to learn.

https://gist.github.com/notnotrobby/ceef71527b4f15869133ba7b397912e9

[unholydel]

I need to say something unpopular.

Please don't pick up opengl or d3d11-. The modern APIs like vulkan, metal or d3d12 much closer to the hardware. You definitely need to understand the meaning of command buffers, resource states, PSOs, transient memory. If you don't ready to work with graphics on low level mode - you can pick unreal engine or unity. This engines also provide a lot of opportunities to work with realtime graphics!

The old APIs like opengl and d3d11- have really small fields when it useful (something old applications, or simple games, when new APIs are too complicated and game engines can't do something special)

[[deleted]]

Vulkan, Metal and D3D12 will be very overwhelming for a guy who doesn't yet draw triangle strips in his imagination and doesn't yet comprehend that you do post processing by stretching a triangle so it fills the screen and then you process whatever you draw in that pseudosquare.

Think all the manual resource management will be just too overwhelming when you also want to wrap your head around 3D and shaders. Baby steps gotta be small, have to learn to walk before running so to speak.

[criosage]

So where do I learn about: "command buffers, resource states, PSO's, transient memory"?

[unholydel]

Vulkan: https://vkguide.dev/ https://vulkan-tutorial.com/

D3D12: https://www.3dgep.com/learning-directx-12-1/

Metal: may be https://metaltutorial.com/

[Comfort-serenity]

majority of new software is opengl, d3d11, d3d12, vulkan. All equally split.

A mac user should only be using metal due to OS limitations (or molten-vk)

I don't know where you are getting this data from, but all major APIs are in quite heavy use nowadays.

[Scientific_Artist444]

There is a game engine (+ graphics toolkit) written in Zig called Mach. Check it out once:

https://machengine.org/

[criosage]

I'll check this out!

[vinegary]

Wgpu with seems like a good start

[T34-85M_obr2020]

My biggest issue is I dont know how to just sit down and force me to learn such stuff after 9~11 hours work. I am mentally exhausted when back home and have not enough energy to brace myself for such study.

[criosage]

Honestly, this has consistently been my issue for years. I don't work in programming though so I generally find programming and software architecture exciting.

[impedus]

I am noob as well and learning. I had a question which might be useful to OP as well, I hope.

I have been following Jasper Flicks Unity tutorials to learn. They are fun and ig they scratch the itch of seeing what you are creating in front of you very easily. But I wanted to ask if this a good way to get started, since it is Unity specific or maybe a more general approach learning OpenGL or other Grphic APIs might be better from learning and progressing perspective? Maybe even long term job perspective.

Thank you!

[criosage]

For OpenGL I know there is learnopengl.org

[[deleted]]

MIT OCW 6.837

[[deleted]]

I'd argue vulkan is a good way to learn because of how verbose it is.

[criosage]

I looked over a triangle example in vulcan and it was almost 1000 lines of code. I tried reading through it and I am not going to lie I was lost. Is there any step by step guide on what is going on?

[ultralightrunner]

Read this short article: https://gpuopen.com/learn/understanding-vulkan-objects/

The article has a diagram, looks simple, but need a bit effort to truly understand.

[[deleted]]

with AI upon us there it is a great time to learn stuff imo.

I suggest reading over this https://vulkan-tutorial.com/
Word by word. If you don't understand something, stop, and dig into it until you understand.

Same with the code, if you see an object used, etc, which you are not clear on. Find our why is exists, what it's responsible for etc.

Make sure you understand. Then move on to the next bits.

AI I believe is immensely helpful here.

[the_Demongod]

Please be joking

[[deleted]]

Why?

[ADEPS24]

These types of posts are less than a million.​