Ask HN: What are the best resources for learning modern 3D graphics?

72 points by kenver 6 years ago | 16 comments

I’ve been out of the 3D graphics game for many years and would like to pick it back up. Things have moved on a lot so I’m looking for a good book on modern 3D graphics and the state of the art.

Jasper_ 6 years ago |

When you say "modern 3D rendering", do you mean modern native APIs like Vulkan, Direct3D 12 and Metal? In that sense, modern GPU programming becomes about scheduling and co-operative buffer management, along with writing programs to be parallel. There's no great guide for this to my knowledge.

If you mean everything above the graphics API, e.g. modern lighting and shading techniques, there is a wide range of choices. PBR-inspired material response models are now dominant, and I recommend Naty Hoffman's slide deck as an excellent overview of the subject [0]. I can go into more details here if wanted. Haines's Real-Time Rendering is a pretty good reference. Get familiar with math, geometry and trigonometry. I recommend "3D Math Primer for Graphics and Games" by Parberry and Dunn [1] if you need a refresher.

[0] https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-cours... [1] https://www.amazon.com/Math-Primer-Graphics-Game-Development...

kenver 6 years ago | |

Thanks for your recommendations. I'll probably be using metal or vulcan for most of my work so I'll need to get an overview of those (I last did graphics work with OpenGL back in the late 90s), but I really want to get an understanding of all the fundamentals - your links will be super helpful.

slavik81 6 years ago |

For rendering rates measured in frames per second, maybe check out "Real-time Rendering", currently on its 4th edition. https://www.realtimerendering.com/

For rendering rates measured in seconds per frame, consider the "Physically Based Rendering Textbook", currently on its 3rd edition. https://www.pbrt.org/

planteen 6 years ago |

Lots of people here are recommending "Real-time Rendering" by Haines. While an excellent book, it goes into a ton of depth and will be very difficult to read cover to cover. Many topics are irrelevant for someone new to graphics.

A much shorter book with breadth is "Foundations of 3D Computer Graphics" by Steven J. Gortler.

abiro 6 years ago |

For an overview: Real-Time Rendering 4th edition by Haines et al.

For advanced techniques:

- GPU Pro and GPU Zen series (ed. Engel)

- Ray Tracing Gems (Haines et al.)

- Unreal Engine tutorials and source code for reference implentation

marknadal 6 years ago |

Me too, please!

I want to build (or use) a custom 3D rendering engine that:

+ Renders from center of screen, in clockwise spiral outward, if any pixels remain after 15ms I want to drop them (should only be peripheral, I'm OK with that in exchange for constant performance time).

+ Can add secondary orthogonal clipping triangles to each triangle, such that the clipping edge could be defined by a curve. Imagine a hexagon (made of 6 triangles), we could easily extend a low poly hexagon into a high resolution circle just by interpolating a curve here.

+ My goal after that is to then define an animation pipeline, where it will procedurally generate thousands of fluid dynamic simulations that it then feeds back into itself as a machine learning training set. Once it has associated these slow compute intensive simulations with the model, ideally we can swap in high-resolution smoke/fluid graphics in-game by only using a few low resolution particle "marker" calculations that then trigger substitutions for the model.

And much more.

I'm OK if this takes me 9 years to make. My target is Rust+WebGL, inspired by the really impressive work of MakePad.

I'm also willing to spend money on people who can teach me this, so please contact me if you're an expert on Shaders and low level WebGL experience.

manytexel 6 years ago | |

With the first two points, it's not clear to me why you want to do that. If the reason is performance, I suggest you should first learn how to program GPUs, then think about it again. It'll be more obvious what you can and can't do efficiently.

> Renders from center of screen, in clockwise spiral outward, if any pixels remain after 15ms I want to drop them (should only be peripheral, I'm OK with that in exchange for constant performance time).

I suppose you could split up your CPU-side render calls into segments and drop the ones that occur beyond what you measure as 15ms.

However, this means that you need to wait for the GPU to finish work after each segment, which has some overhead. It's probably better to figure out how much you can fit into 15ms ahead of time and then submit all that in one go.

> Can add secondary orthogonal clipping triangles to each triangle, such that the clipping edge could be defined by a curve. Imagine a hexagon (made of 6 triangles), we could easily extend a low poly hexagon into a high resolution circle just by interpolating a curve here.

This kind of variable-length output problem is something that GPUs aren't very good at. You could do it with Geometry Shaders, but those tend to perform poorly and aren't available in WebGL (or Apple Metal).

It might be better to just submit a sufficient amount of vertices, which you can analytically displace, so for example you don't have to supply the coordinates of every vertex on the circle, but rather calculate them from the index on-the-fly. You can also use Tesselation Shaders to amplify geometry in an efficient and view-adaptive way, but again that's not in WebGL.

Having said that, all of this "smart rendering" might not be necessary at all. After all, your goal is to train a neural network. You can probably just use an off-the-shelf renderer with off-the-shelf hardware and it'll be fast enough to not be the bottleneck - especially nine years down the line.

Jasper_ 6 years ago | |

GPUs get their performance from parallelism, and it has been a core defining feature that GPUs render pixels in 2x2 pixel squares calls "quads". This is a requirement for the traditional GPU graphics programming model. The GPU programming model does not mandate any sort of pixel ordering, and doing that will kill performance.

> Can add secondary orthogonal clipping triangles to each triangle, such that the clipping edge could be defined by a curve.

GPUs deal with triangles. Period. You cannot get arbitrary curved geometry. You could do this at the pixel shader, discarding pixels that don't meet the curve profile, but that's hard to make 3D, and you'll be relying on post-style AA (like FXAA), or analytic AA and blending. Maybe that's fine for you. But flatly declaring "I need to be able to do curved geometry" is refusing the last 25+ years of GPU development.

> Once it has associated these slow compute intensive simulations with the model, ideally we can swap in high-resolution smoke/fluid graphics in-game by only using a few low resolution particle "marker" calculations that then trigger substitutions for the model.

Realistic smoke/fluid graphics can exist (see NVIDIA's Flow), but you don't tend to see them in games because games prefer techniques that mesh with the lighting, art style, and interact with the environment (smoke that respects the ceiling, fluid that collides with the floor). For some meager effects it's possible to do collision with the depth buffer. The simulation part is honestly the easy part.

planteen 6 years ago | |

Keep in mind that GPUs are asynchronous. So with WebGL, you send a series of draw calls to the GPU and don't have a way of pulling a result out early. Some extensions for OpenGL ES let you preempt for another rendering task, but not sure if that would help you.

Your clockwise idea doesn't make a ton of sense to me. You typically have a depth buffer enabled in 3D and draw your scene in a front to back fashion. This lets you save on evaluations of the fragment shader for meshes that are occluded.

I guess you could sort draws in your clockwise spiral and synchronize after each one, but that is going to be a massive performance drag since the GPU can't pipeline draws anymore.

ArtWomb 6 years ago |

All good suggestions ;)