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Comment by quelsolaar | Hacker News Reader

As a graphics programmer i think its good to have a well rounded idea about how graphics works. Here are some things I would expect a good graphics programmer to know, beyond just programming and an API:

-Rotation view and projection matrices, and general vector math.

-Shader programming.

-Procedural primitives like voronoi, SDF and perlin.

-Image Compositing.

-Forward and deferred rendering.

-Various sampling techniques.

-Shadow and lighting techniques.

-Knowing a bit about how the art pipeline works and how to get data out of 3D apps.

-Being comfortable using a profiler and debugger.

-Capable of reading Siggraph papers.

-Knowing various spacial partitioning and volume hierarchy techniques.

-Being able to build a simple raytracer.

-Good understanding of primitives, like sprites, triangles n-gons and so on.

-Some particle and simulation experience.

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>Knowing a bit about how the art pipeline works and how to get data out of 3D apps.

Could you expand a bit on how to approach this? It's something I'm very interested in and I know the bare basics of how a model is made (model -> skin/rig -> animated -> textured) and a rough idea of how you write all this to a file. But it can be hard to really get some proper hands on experience here in particular without an artist on board.

Do you know how one can get a job as a graphics developer if they know most of these? I do Graphics programming as a hobby, and I learned a lot of what you mentioned here. But since I don't have any job experience, I never really get any interviews.

Always hard to get a foot in the door into a new role when one doesn't have direct company experience in the role on a resume.

The best thing I can think of would be to work on some independent projects (eg. some mod of a game, some indie game or graphics related app itself) and have that work be part of a portfolio.

The other approach that I've seen work is to get into a games company as it is significantly expanding and make it known that you want to do rendering work in the future. At an old company I was at a Gameplay Programmer pivoted to being a Graphics Programmer as the graphics team needed more help and was expanding, and I see via linked in that he's continued in that path.

Where do you learn this stuff?

Googling it works pretty well

A good start would be the book Real-Time Rendering: https://www.realtimerendering.com/

A lot of these things are covered in computer science lectures if you pick the right ones. But you can also pick them up yourself by being curious how things work and reading papers or looking at existing game/engine source code. There are also many online resources as the sibling posters point out. Having at least some basic linear algebra or programming education makes things easier to understand.

School, then work, is the most traditional route. If you’re past that point and want to learn, the best use of that list is to use it as a self-learning syllabus and set of search terms, so you can start to practice.

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