TL;DR: Too hard to learn; many people stick with OpenGL. In the meantime, a colleague at my university asked if it would be safe to basically switch to path tracing altogether for year 2 courses next year, using the APIs to render 2 tris essentially...
@dotstdy@jbikker@gob My personal opinion: those "low level features" are often not even how any single real GPU works. Vulkan abstracts the driver for many architectures, not hardware.
I always advocate for using WebGL/OGL/DX11/frameworks/shadertoy/even engines for education, and I get criticized for it. :)
@lisyarus@dotstdy@jbikker@gob Seeing my first triangle and then a box on screen was such a huge joy and motivation to keep learning graphics. I have a short attention span, and if I had to either copy a few thousand line code blob that I don't understand or spend a few weeks on concepts that were "not yet" relevant for me and I could not conceptualize, it would probably demotivate me and cause me to lose my attention/interest...
@lisyarus@dotstdy@jbikker@gob and I don't have a problem with the "bottom-up" approach either. But in this framework, one could start with making one's own GPU-like software/hardware (fun!), blitting pixels or lines, and working up. Or "top-down," starting with a high level and filling the gaps. Starting from the middle feels bizarre...
In our original 20min slides, we didn't have enough time to explain aliasing from non-linearities properly and why it's more apparent if done before magnification. This was not clear and confused some folks, so we fixed it. Here is a relevant timestamp: https://youtu.be/e3391_C6aXE?t=1812
@ArthurBrussee thank you! :) we spent a lot of time trying to make our points clear and connect them to trends and practices, as the core idea might seem either trivial/obvious (many precedents) and not worth publishing, or preposterous - depending on the context and reader's/listener's experience. 😅
Biden has already lost based on swing states polls: it will be a landslide. Anyone thinking otherwise is delusional. Economy is doing ok, but people don't feel it is, and you cannot fight emotions with facts. And the "hard to mobilize" groups like young or voters of color will stay home because of Israel.
Those are just facts. :)
I think AI is legit and big players will survive, but 90% VC money is in bs startups that will collapse.
@ninepoints thanks for the post! Will read it in detail today, but it's super awesome you do it. :)
I get this question asked super often, so I will have a nice starting link to point folks to—even if I already see I'd disagree with some advice. :) (I probably would suggest WebGL as a total starting point and then DX11—but on the latter, I am probably alone.) My reasoning: starting with high-level graphics concepts: buffers, transitions, etc., are distracting and platform-specific.
@ninepoints my disagreement doesn't come from usefulness of something or not. :) Some graphics programmers will never touch a BRDF, some will never touch an API buffer - sure.
But my core disagreement comes from the "education" part. 1. Concepts should be introduced gradually and the incremental introductions should be possible to try out and "exercise" immediately. 2. Early on, one should get a big picture and shared basics first and be able to play with it.
@ninepoints of course there are many experts who do only this kind of work and this is super valuable and still 100% graphics programming. :)
I don't know the percentages, but it's not relevant to my point - rather, do you think it's possible to get started with complex abstract APIs and 1000 lines for a single triange before understanding the GPU pipeline, what those buffers mean etc? It's just very hard to teach gradually/incrementally, IMO.
@ninepoints I think low level API programming is something best learned on the job and on real workloads/platforms - you might disagree, of course.
And btw., OpenGL is not how hardware works, but neither is Vulkan. :) Both are abstraction layers, one higher, the other one lower. My experience with education is to always start with the least amount of concepts and most high level, then fill in the blanks and details. Also starting with shared language/concepts.
@bitinn It's very company-dependent, I think. I started in 2010, so a bit later, but then there was an expectation of unpaid brutal crunch and "if you don't like it, leave" —80-hour work weeks, abuse, etc. Then, the same company started including partially paid overtime and fully paid overtime. Over the next 8y, every company I went to had an attitude of "we want to avoid it, but it's a necessary evil" with more and more awareness that it's abusive.
@bitinn Really sorry to hear that. :( Hope it's transient and things will just sort out...
I am out of touch with gamedev post-2018, so no idea if this applies to Western companies as well, but with all the layoffs, maybe partially as well...
"In May 2024, Lubetzky was one of a group of billionaires and business interests who privately pressured New York City Mayor Eric Adams to deploy police on pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University"
It is so fucking infuriating that the same politicians accuse student protestors of being under the influence of some "agents" while they are under clear and documented influences of interest groups (and literal agents like AIPAC).
AIPAC should be delegalized as foreign agents under the Espionage Act, not TikTok.
Does anyone know of any code laying around the net that distributes points on a mesh in a blue noise distribution?
A student intern i work with is looking for this. It's tempting to write it, but im also kinda swamped :X
@demofox haven't tried in practice, so might be suboptimal, but I am pretty sure it would be "correct": I would probably do 3D Mitchel's best candidate on some conservative voxel grid around the mesh, then take only points closer to a surface than some epsilon and project them onto surface (can be done as gather, not scatter). But it depends if you want the blue noise with geodesic distance (surface connectivity) or 3D. For most meshes (convex or locally almost convex), should be ~similar.