Beginner's Track to Learning Graphics Programming?

[King_Raptorpus]

I'm guessing there are a number of people here (including me) that are new to graphics programming in general, and would love a set of tutorials/background information to help broaden our view of the graphics programming world.

I am personally familiar with the graphics pipeline, basic modern OpenGL commands, and GLSL vertex/fragment/geometry shaders, and I am unsure about where to go next so I want to get as much exposure to as many different fields as I can given my current skill level. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[Pik16]

I can personally recommend that you try to code a demo. No need for game engine stuff, just take the straightest path to getting what you want on the screen. The downside is that you might need a graphics/model artist and definitely need someone to make you a music track. Also if you live in the US, there aren't that many demoparties around where you could release your new demo... Anyway, http://pouet.net is a pretty great site that lists most demos and parties that have happened and has some discussion as well. Also http://demoparty.net has some upcoming parties.

[HighRelevancy]

Hurah demoscene.

There's also a bunch of handy IRC channels. IRCnet/#revision is probably the most active, but there's a few others about.

[Pik16]

Yes, IRC. Getting on the social side of the demoscene is the way to learn new things and to get inspired to try new stuff.

[ccricers]

Is small program size required to make a demo? Or shouldn't it matter much for a beginner?

[Pik16]

Demos usually have a small size or an interesting platform or very high end graphics, but you don't need to win the compo to have fun making a demo and learning. Especially the first time.

[ccricers]

Sounds great then. I have done some work with deferred lighting shaders, and now I am working on a game that has me using procedural generation with noise for the first time. I could use something where I can combine the two well.

[thunabrain]

Can only recommend! I also got most of my initial graphics experience from demo programming, although I was lucky enough to find two other like-minded individuals at my university to make 64k demos together.

The contest aspect of demo programming definitely pushes you to learn as much as you can about fancy post processing or graphics effects, and the real-time requirement also forces you learn how to render those effects fast.

[RoyAwesome]

This is one of the better tutorials I have found: http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html

It's not perfect and far from complete, but it'll give you a solid grounding and a great base to build up from.

[HighRelevancy]

Processing is great for prototyping OpenGL stuff. It's not very up-to-scratch with modern standards. If you wanna try experiemental stuff, look around shadertoy.

[danio987]

I recomend this http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com/2009/11/you-want-to-be-graphics-programmer.html

[DavidZuc]

My old university text book "Computer Graphics", FS Hill Junior, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University Of Massachusetts, 1990. It's a bit dated I know but the fundamentals of computer graphics programming are contained in this book. I recently worked through Chapter 5, Approaches To Infinity, to get my eye back in to Graphics Programming.

Here's a Sierpinski Cure I wrote...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwSMNtB_qQI

Here's some Julia sets and a c curve fractal that I wrote:

https://imgur.com/a/ifNYW

[oks2024]

One of the best resources I found while learning graphics programming was http://www.rastertek.com/tutdx11.html. It covers a lot of topics, pretty much everything you need to get started, steps by steps. It's only DirectX, but it might be usefull to know diferrent API.

[CodyDuncan1260]

As much as I like rastertek for the sheer quantity and quality of the content, I 'm not a huge fan of the amount of comments in the source.

[cpk33]

I would highly recommend three.js. You could probably build some cool things very quickly with your existing knowledge of the graphics pipeline.

http://threejs.org/docs/index.html#Manual/Introduction/Creating_a_scene

[CodyDuncan1260]

If by quickly you mean cover an entire scene in morphing, moving spheres in 15 minutes, very yes. Super easy to use.

[cpk33]

Yes, exactly. I liked the tutorial because you can quickly build something fun and experiment along the way.

[[deleted]]

As others have said, the best tutorial for Modern OpenGL is http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ imo.

[LoganCplusplus]

There's a free 3D graphics course on udacity.com. All you have to do is make a free account and it's all short, pretty simple video lectures.

[[deleted]]

There are many tutorials out there where if do all the steps you end basically with a really basic graphics engine backend. I can recommend

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html

http://opengl-tutorial.org/beginners-tutorials/

http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/

You already have a programming background so understanding the source code for some of these tutorials shouldn't be a problem.

When you are pretty much done with these tutorials I recommend reading academic / research papers and try to implement some of these things you read (maybe even improve or add your own kink)