GoKawiilI get asked fairly often what people need to know to be hireable as a graphics programmer. I figured it was time to make a page to link instead of re-typing it each time.
We are in a strange time with LLMs. I think ML as it is right now won’t live up to the hype, and the pendulum will swing away from ML a bit over the next couple years. I think the grifters will move onto quantum computing next or find some other thing to pump and dump. However, ML itself does have a place in the computer science tool box, so learning about the fitting and optimization techniques it offers is valuable IMO. I made a video you can watch to learn about the bare metal bits, but it’s up to you if you think it’s worth while to learn or not.
Machine Learning For Game Developers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTAqWRsEiy0
Besides that:
Modern rendering is sort of like two jobs in one.
Learning the CPU side – Learning DirectX12, Vulkan, Metal, or similar modern “explicit” APIs and the engine programming to support loading assets and other supporting tasks. Learning the GPU side – the mathematics of modern lighting and shading, rendering techniques like shadows, ambient occlusion, and post processing effects. Also understanding what is fast and what is slow on the GPU, to know how to make things that run better in real time.
It’s very difficult to learn both things at once. If you want to focus on #2, then you could use a simpler thing for #1, such as opengl, webgl, DirectX11, an engine, or similar. If you want to focus on #1, you should work until you get a first triangle up on the screen, then get a mesh on screen, and so on, but don’t worry about it being very pretty.
Part of #2 is writing a path tracer. Path tracing is how movies do rendering, and it is what we try to approximate with modern real time rendering techniques. A great place to start with a path tracer is this free book online “Ray Tracing in One Weekend”. A lot of people have used it. It’s really approachable and shows you how to make photo realistic renderings.
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