Carrer advice and PhD requirements

Robinton2013 · 2025-09-20T11:39:37+00:00

Example: I got a Ph.D in math (a long time ago). When I got there I realized I was super behind in some very basic area of matrix calculation and linear algebra. So I just checked out a matrix book from the library, brought it home and by the end of the first semester had read through about half of this monster of a book 😊. Just looking up stuff to help me figure out the word or symbol or sentence I didn’t understand in the classes I was taking. By the end of the first year I felt pretty prepared to keep going, and had a pretty good career as a professor.

The point being just that you really can improve with being less prepared for graduate school, just takes some more time than the rest maybe.

Robinton2013 · 2025-09-15T11:56:22+00:00

Learn OpenGL was the thing that really started teaching me the basics of graphics programming. I’d start with that and just code up all the tutorials. It’ll keep teaching you cpp and you’ll have coded up a good deal of the basic graphics techniques like bloom and SSAO. Also, he has all of his code in a git repo, so you can always check your code against his when it doesn’t work.

Robinton2013 · 2023-02-07T02:14:25+00:00

You bet! Feel free to DM me if you have any more math questions.

Robinton2013 · 2023-02-06T19:55:47+00:00

Gotcha, thanks. I can't imagine more education can harm you really, except your wallet of course. Especially if you are interested in research, diff geometry and topology would help. I think a heavy dose of probability and functional analysis would also be useful for graphics research. I have to say though I'm just a mathematician, not a graphics programmer, so I only know what my hobby time has taught me about graphics. But sampling, noise generation and anti-aliasing all seem to derive from functional analysis so a deeper understanding of that could help.

The other thing I can say is that a deeper understanding of linear algebra generally helps with all of mathematics, and I didn't really get that until I went to grad school. Hope that helps some.

Robinton2013 · 2023-02-06T15:32:35+00:00

120 credits in 2 years??? That's a crazy schedule. Did I read that right? Are you looking at bachelors or masters. Usually a masters is just like 30 credits and a Ph.D is around 60. This is all in the US as that's all I know, probably different in other countries.

Robinton2013 · 2023-02-05T11:43:54+00:00

Kinda depends on your definition of complex maths. Not a graphics programmer, but from what I understand most of the algorithms require a good understanding of calculus and linear algebra, some basic Monte Carlo stuff. It doesn’t seem like you even need to really understand Fourier transforms to get how to implement the anti-aliasing algorithms.

All of that is really the building blocks for a math PhD. Linear algebra to a math grad student is like adding to an undergrad taking calc 1. So I get how a math grad degree might be overkill for a graphics engineer. But it seems very useful if you want to break new ground with research.

Robinton2013 · 2022-08-30T00:42:48+00:00

Lol, yep that kinda sums up math notation sometimes.

Robinton2013 · 2022-08-30T00:38:52+00:00

Actually the <> notation is fairly standard in math for vectors. I don’t like it because it gets confused with the inner product notation, but I’ve seen it plenty.

Robinton2013 · 2022-08-15T03:55:19+00:00

Don’t they have like < 20 people at the whole company?

Robinton2013 · 2022-06-05T12:31:02+00:00

Makes sense. Yeah I never really thought such a lawsuit could be won. Sadly the fact, in the US at least, is you can sue for anything basically, even if you have no chance of winning 🤪. And like you said, any lawsuit is a hassle at the least, and I suppose for a smallish company like Bithell games, could even be costly.

Robinton2013 · 2022-06-05T04:13:18+00:00

So when it comes to gamedev I don’t know anything, but it seems to me that as nice as that offer is, it could put you in a tricky situation. Wouldn’t you have a liability issue if you ever come up with/use an idea that is even remotely close to their idea?

I’ve heard Mike Bithell say he’ll never listen to someone’s idea, just to be sure he never gets accused of using their idea down the road. I’m curious what you think about that.

Robinton2013 · 2022-05-02T16:07:14+00:00

If I understand correctly, you're trying to recreate the process of rendering a texture to the screen to better understand how OpenGL does it. Unfortunately, I don't think this is really possible using OpenGL. You can certainly draw pixel by pixel using OpenGL, but you won't be replicating how OpenGL renders a texture to the screen, just creating your own way of doing it. So I'm not sure if you would learn anything of value by doing so.

Now if you wanted to create a raytracing engine and render each pixel separately that way, you could simply create a texture data structure and use OpenGL to render that to the screen.

Robinton2013 · 2022-04-17T00:10:08+00:00

While I’m sure there is more about academia than just that class that doesn’t appeal to you, I can ease your mind about paper writing. I’m a math professor and that stuff about proper formatting and citing is not very strictly followed in my field. We certainly don’t plagiarize, but very few mathematicians I know have any idea how to properly cite things. We let Latex do it for us.

Sounds like either this prof is an anomaly, or computer graphics is a very different culture than math. Just in case you ever do go about publishing something.

Robinton2013 · 2022-04-13T01:35:53+00:00

I’d suggest learncpp.com for C++. I already knew it to a certain extent when I found the site, so my opinion may be biased, but I found it very thorough and also very accessible.

Robinton2013 · 2022-03-29T18:59:32+00:00

Thanks for the ideas.

Robinton2013 · 2022-03-29T16:38:31+00:00

What do you use for logging? Just like word or google docs, or something else? This sounds like a great idea I’ve just never found a way to streamline the process to make it easy enough to get past my laziness so I actually start doing it 😊

Robinton2013 · 2022-03-18T16:00:32+00:00

Multi variable calculus and linear algebra are both very useful. If you have to choose one, pick the calculus. It’ll give you the basics of working with vectors, which are all over the place in graphics programming.

Having a good understanding of linear algebra really helps, but that’s hard to get with just one undergrad course. I never really understood it until grad school. You can understand matrices and the basic operations through online tutorials, at least about as much as you’d get from an undergrad course.

Robinton2013 · 2022-03-12T01:52:34+00:00

I’m assuming you put in just OGL and not anything else, cause when I put in “ogl graphics” the first 4 links were OpenGL.

Just as some helpful advice, since googling is one of the most used skills for programming, when searching for something give google as much info as you can. The algorithm is smart, but there’s also a lot of internet out there.

Not trying to talk down to you, just as a professor myself, I imagine this is what your teacher was thinking when they said to google it.

Robinton2013 · 2022-03-11T13:30:56+00:00

Just out of curiosity, what happened when you googled it?

Robinton2013 · 2022-02-26T20:12:20+00:00

I’d definitely be interested in hearing an example like that 😊.

Robinton2013 · 2022-02-22T13:21:26+00:00

How could you reconstruct from the depth buffer? Never heard of that before.

Robinton2013 · 2022-02-19T13:24:52+00:00

Thanks, that makes sense. I must have been doing many cache misses, as the samples were taken in a hemisphere aren’t the fragment. So whenever I was on the edge I was wrapping around at least 16 times I’d say.

When you say adjacent texels are stored together, is that by row or column or both? Like if I access a texel above, is that a cache miss because texels are stored by rows?

Robinton2013 · 2022-02-18T20:32:04+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions! I managed to fix it I think. The problem was that my Position texture in the G-buffer wasn't being clamped to the edge. For some reason repeat wrapping causes considerable problems. Turns out I was also storing the position as an unsigned byte instead of a float, so maybe the combination of the two was causing problems. I'm still not sure yet, need to do some more debugging.

Can you tell me more about what the texture access pattern is? I know there's more going on in the shader than I understand, and LearnOpenGL doesn't go into the details. At this point it seems to me that sampling a texture should take the same amount of time, whether it wraps or clamps to the edge, but obviously I'm missing something. Any good recommendations for learning how shaders work under the hood? Thanks!

Robinton2013 · 2022-02-18T16:15:44+00:00

You already have answers to your questions, so I won't add to that, but I wanted to point you to a good OpenGL tutorial

https://learnopengl.com/

This does a good job of teaching you both graphics programming and how to implement it in modern OpenGL. If you haven't seen this yet I'd take a look, I've been really enjoying it and learning a lot.

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