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I 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

Modern rendering is sort of like two jobs in one.

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. https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.html

Another part of #2 is learning “Physically based rendering” or PBR, which is a way of applying lighting (mainly specular, when it comes down to it). PBR is “principled,” meaning if you stick to the rules, you get good results. Before PBR, people wrote random equations for lighting with all sorts of random tweaks and hacks. It made it so you could make an asset that looked good in one situation, but changing the lighting would make it look too dark or would look like it was glowing. People had to make different versions of the assets for different lighting conditions, which was a lot of time and effort. PBR lets your assets look better in all lighting conditions by default, and saves the time and effort of having to make different versions. It was a big win for our industry. Even so, asset creation time, money and effort is still a big bottleneck in game development.