[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

Stephen Fuld <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> spake the secret code
<tnvjaa$13ekq$1@dont-email.me> thusly:

> From this post, and from many of your previous posts, you clearly know
>a lot about the "guts" of 3D graphics. This is an area I know
>essentially nothing about, but have been curious about for a long time.
>So I am asking you (and, of course, by posting this, everyone else), how
>did you learn about this stuff?

Classes, books, and writing code.

>I have looked for books, but the ones I find seem to either be "How to
>use a particular graphics library" (which I don't care about), or very
>quickly get so deeply into the mathematics of some aspect of the problem
>that I can't see the forest for the trees.

A long time ago (circa 1998), I was trying to learn the Direct3D API.
I thought the existing books sucked and so I (famously) said "I could
write a better book than that!" and attempted to do so. For a number
of years I proceeded to work on such a book.

The idea was to explain concepts first and then show how the API
exposes those concepts to the programmer. The concepts in 3D graphics
haven't really changed in decades. Only the APIs have moved about
over that time. You can look at APIs proposed as standard and they
really aren't much different from the APIs you would use today. The
differences are in the details of how you create resources on the
graphics device and how you tell the graphics device to draw stuff.

Since my day job is not writing books and technology continues to move
without waiting for me to finish my book, there was a certain point
where I just decided to put the book online as-is for free. My goal
was to help people understand, not to try and make money from writing
books.

The chapters (and dataflow poster of the pipeline) are available for
free here:
<https://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On 7/24/2023 8:54 AM, Richard wrote:
> [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]
>
> Stephen Fuld <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> spake the secret code
> <tnvjaa$13ekq$1@dont-email.me> thusly:
>
>> From this post, and from many of your previous posts, you clearly know
>> a lot about the "guts" of 3D graphics. This is an area I know
>> essentially nothing about, but have been curious about for a long time.
>> So I am asking you (and, of course, by posting this, everyone else), how
>> did you learn about this stuff?
>
> Classes, books, and writing code.
>
>> I have looked for books, but the ones I find seem to either be "How to
>> use a particular graphics library" (which I don't care about), or very
>> quickly get so deeply into the mathematics of some aspect of the problem
>> that I can't see the forest for the trees.
>
> A long time ago (circa 1998), I was trying to learn the Direct3D API.
> I thought the existing books sucked and so I (famously) said "I could
> write a better book than that!" and attempted to do so. For a number
> of years I proceeded to work on such a book.
>
> The idea was to explain concepts first and then show how the API
> exposes those concepts to the programmer. The concepts in 3D graphics
> haven't really changed in decades. Only the APIs have moved about
> over that time. You can look at APIs proposed as standard and they
> really aren't much different from the APIs you would use today. The
> differences are in the details of how you create resources on the
> graphics device and how you tell the graphics device to draw stuff.
>
> Since my day job is not writing books and technology continues to move
> without waiting for me to finish my book, there was a certain point
> where I just decided to put the book online as-is for free. My goal
> was to help people understand, not to try and make money from writing
> books.
>
> The chapters (and dataflow poster of the pipeline) are available for
> free here:
> <https://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>

Wow, a thread back from the dead! I started looking at it and it looks
very interesting. Though I an less interested in the details of Direct
3D, using it as an organizing principle might just work for me.

Of course, it will take time for me to go through it and absorb what it
presents, but I wanted to thank you for writing this, and, of course,
for responding to my request and posting the link.

--
- Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)

[Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

Stephen Fuld <sfuld@alumni.cmu.edu.invalid> spake the secret code
<u9matm$o0jj$1@dont-email.me> thusly:

>Wow, a thread back from the dead! I started looking at it and it looks
>very interesting. Though I an less interested in the details of Direct
>3D, using it as an organizing principle might just work for me.

Yeah, once the chapter starts talking about the programming API you
can probably just skim through that and move onto the next part that
discusses a concept.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>