Ask HN: How to self-learn graphics programming?

• tinyrenderer

  61 19,305 0.0 C++

  A brief computer graphics / rendering course

Linear algebra is really important for graphics programming, but there's really only a handful of concepts you need to get started (vectors, matrix operations (rotation, translation, scale)). This course is relatively short and should give you a good background on these topics: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x... . For me, I learned more from the course than my college level linear algebra class.

Other important things to learn are what Vector and Fragment shaders are. I think this course is a good intro for it: https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer

Lastly, when you are ready to start writing real graphics code, you might want to consider using something like Metal if you are on macOS. I have found it to have a much better API than OpenGL. Here's a good book on the topic: https://gumroad.com/l/metalbyexample . I haven't used DirectX, but I imagine its probably much better than OpenGL too.

If you do want to use OpenGL, I found these to be good resources: https://open.gl and http://learnopengl.com/

• gfx

  11 5,325 0.0 Rust

  [maintenance mode] A low-overhead Vulkan-like GPU API for Rust.

  

https://crates.io/crates/tiny-skia

You can put things together pretty easily with these libs. And they also let you skip the gpu boilerplate (I should note that tiny-skia works only in the CPU).

Lastly, you have shader programming (OpenGL, Vulkan, etc.). If you're writing "production code" you'll have to do some setting up of the GPU, and the actual graphics code will be in a separate shader language. Shader languages are similar to C but with restrictions that allow for a high level of parallism, making it extremely fast. If you want to get started with this I'd recommend playing around on a site like shadertoy[1] where you can start writing shaders right away. I haven't done much of this myself but as far as Rust goes I've seen a lot of references to the gfx crate:

https://crates.io/crates/gfx

I hope this helps

[1] https://www.shadertoy.com/

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