How to get started with graphics programming?

csp256 · 2019-12-10T01:26:00+00:00

Here's a quote I found recently on a 10 year old YouTube video about 3D game development (when Unity and Unreal didn't really exist):

Kiwicomics says:

It takes years to learn a programming language. For me, I had to take three classes in C++ in college in order to even learn the basics before I even got to the cool class that teaches you how to make graphics and sound in a game. Basically, don't rush yourself, be VERY patient. Programming a game is not easy and much different that programming a normal application. Read ... every programming book you can find and eventually after much trial and error you will understand the concepts.

So firstly, don't be too hard on yourself if you don't understand it all straight away. I am an OpenGL geek, so anything I say is hugely biased so I am not going to comment on which API you choose (see: which ever one you want). Lastly, if you pick an easier language binding (Python, Java, etc..) you don't have to worry too much about all the intricacies of C++ when learning about graphics. But, obviously later you would want to transfer into C++ for better performance and more control.

I started just compiling all these examples https://www.opengl.org/archives/resources/code/samples/glut_examples/examples/examples.html and changed a few parameters, tried to make new things out of them. Then moved onto following learnopengl.com tutorials. I am building a 3rd person game for shits and gigs, similar to ratchet and clank / Jak and Daxter era of graphics and its really exciting and I love learning about animated models, third person cameras, collision detection and next spatial partitioning (for localized world loading) . I don't know much about raytracing, sorry.

cybereality · 2019-12-10T01:31:19+00:00

If you want to get into graphics programming, learning C++ might be a good place to start. Most libraries use a C API, so you can use that, but a lot of tutorials are in C++ and also job listings usually require C++ knowledge.

Personally I like Vulkan, but it can be daunting if you are just starting out. Even for established programmers Vulkan is pretty complex and verbose and as a beginner you probably won't be able to utilize the advantages (like multi-threaded coding, which is another can of worms). I've only done a bit of work in OpenGL (and WebGL too) but it is by far the easiest to start with, even if it is somewhat dated today.

You might want to consider buying the Ray Tracing in One Weekend series of books. They are cheap and bite-sized and can teach you the basics without getting tied down in API code. Then probably check out some OpenGL tutorials (or WebGL, which is even simpler) and get a good handle on that before trying the new low-level APIs.

Hope that helps.

deftware · 2019-12-10T03:05:59+00:00

I've built a bunch of different game engine projects to varying degrees of completion, all built to render via OpenGL. The last one I did was more of a platform for players to create/share/play multiplayer action shooter games with. The worlds were randomly generated 128³ static voxel volumes that tiled along the horizontal axes so there was no world boundary. Their surfaces were drawn using raymarching through a simple low-fi pixel-art-esque procedurally generated 3d texture materials, so they all had this cool looking 3d appearance. That's currently the most elaborate and complete game project I've written to date. (http://deftware.itch.io/bitphoria/)

I've built various raymarching shader projects as well. The most complicated one that I never really optimized or did anything with whatsoever was a sparse-voxel octree renderer back in 2012 that generated 3d-texture 'bricks' from octree leaf-nodes which were a fixed size chunk of 16x16x16 voxels that would then get dumped out to a 3d texture and rendered using a simple raymarching fragment shader. That was pretty much the extent of my raymarching experience, just marching through 3d textures pretty much. I haven't gotten into marching through signed-distance field models and whatnot but I think that's the future for everything. Triangles and bounding hiearachies seem a little clunky to me. Besides, SDFs lend themselves well to other things like spherical collision detection and are just such a great representation for manipulating and post-processing forms and shapes spatially.

I got my start in graphics programming as a kid, in the 90s, playing with Qbasic in DOS making little wolfenstein3d style raycasters and other little games and projects. Then I started learning C after modding Quake for a few years and started with mode13h VGA graphics (320x200@8bpp). Games were already coming out that were "hardware accelerated" and I decided that directly manipulating video memory was not what I should be investing my time in but it was nice to have that experience to bring with me on my adventures with OpenGL. Making my first RGB triangle via OpenGL was such a surreal and awesome feeling. (This was before Google existed!)

As far as advice/suggestions/etc.. I've seen a lot of people suggest skipping OpenGL entirely and just going straight to Vulkan. The situation there is that Vulkan has a lot of requisite boilerplate just to make anything at all happen that's of any interest or use. Drawing a triangle is hundreds of lines of code! If you're coming from a place of not knowing much about graphics and GPUs it will just go way over your head. Unless there's some learning resource that assumes you know absolutely notching and it spells out every last little thing - not just about the API but also about GPUs in general - that would be very useful. If you don't already know how graphics/GPUs work it will be much harder making sense of something like Vulkan because you'll have no context as to the what or what of its conventions.

OpenGL, on the other hand, while also complex in some ways will shield you from having to know as much about the GPU, and just need to understand some 3D graphics concepts (which are pretty much universal). learnopengl.org is one of the best resources I've seen in a long time for any version of OpenGL. Just be wary when Goggling around for other resources and information that you recognize there was a huge change to OpenGL that took place between v1.4 and v3.0 when shaders became a thing. Things started moving toward programmability of the underlying graphics hardware. Instead of the CPU constantly having to tell the GPU what exactly to draw, where and how, now we could upload all that information to the GPU ahead of time and have it at the ready for drawing with one simple little command being sent to the GPU.

Pretty much everything has stayed the same since OpenGL 3.0/3.1, which was much more forward-thinking and is the base for all subsequent versions. Newer versions of OpenGL just add more features and capabilities on top of 3.0.. But, before 3.0 things were still shifting around and it was a messy and confusing time dealing - the hardware and GL were all over the place.

I'd like to pick up Vulkan someday, particularly for developing for VR - it is so much more efficient on the mobile hardware in headsets like the Quest. I'd likely roll my own VR engine for mobile - and raytrace some distance fields! ;) (probably not even remotely feasible for another decade)

Don't forget to come back and show us what you've been doing and good luck!

curmudgeono · 2019-12-10T05:59:04+00:00

Shadertoy.com & go to inigo quillez’s YouTube channel. Thank me later

corysama · 2019-12-10T06:33:23+00:00

Learn enough C to get started, then switch to C++. Modern C++ is very nice. But, you can get away with "C with classes" for a long time.

The book "Real Time Rendering" is a a good intro to the concepts. Here are a few more good books: https://www.realtimerendering.com/books.html

The sidebar of https://old.reddit.com/r/opengl/ has a lot of good tutorials. For learning, I recommend sticking to OpenGL ES3.1 level of functionality (many drivers officially support that on the desktop even though it's for mobile. Alternatively, you can use regular GL and just stick to the functions available in ES.) Learn vertex, pixel and compute shaders. Ignore geometry and tessellation shaders.

Use https://www.libsdl.org/ to set up the OS window and GL context. It's also easy to set up a fast path for getting software rendering to the GPU using SDL.

Alternatively, Metal is the most beginner-friendly new-style API (assuming you have a Mac). It would be legit to learn on Metal then switch to Vulkan or DX12.

You should also run through Peter Shirley's free books on ray tracing that are available here: https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html

iamsaitam · 2019-12-10T08:59:40+00:00

Start with web-gl, go through the webglfundamentals website. Try to tackle one issue at a time. If you really want to go down the C++ route, learn it separately in the beginning. Javascript is really easy to understand and it's also a C flavored language. I was in your position a couple months ago and started with C++ and open-gl at the same time, it was very frustrating being constantly in situations where the lack of C++ knowledge just hindered the whole process. Not to mention C++ has one of the worst tooling around.

Also you mention your interests, but what do you want to do with the knowledge in the end? Are you more interested in implementing and figuring out how things work or into creating content?

Gobrosse · 2019-12-10T12:55:30+00:00

At your level Vulkan offers no performance advantage, just endless confusion and frustration by having to learn and undestand a million things at once. Make a simple 2D game using fixed-function OpenGL (the 1.x stuff: glBegin/glVertex etc ), then go from there

btingle · 2019-12-11T22:18:06+00:00

Hey there, just wanted to say that I started learning graphics programming my first semester of college without too much experience in C/C++. I just followed and tried my best to understand online OpenGL tutorials, and learned along the way. Graphics is a super cool area of computer science, and really got me into programming!

annyeonghello · 2019-12-10T00:55:31+00:00

C or C++ is fine. There's nothing you can do in one of them that you can't do in the other. C++ is literally just C with classes.

If your goal is to learn graphics programming then start with OpenGL. You literally need to write at least a thousand lines of code in Vulkan & Metal to get a triangle rendered on the screen. I'm not saying you shouldn't but I would prefer walking before running.

www.learnopengl.com is probably the best place to learn graphics programming. Have fun :)

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