A page dedicated to a favorite few links and resources I wish I could have given my younger self. Maybe they’ll benefit someone else or pique their curiosity. Some of the things listed here are kind-of old and aren’t updated or even maintained, but still incredibly valuable.
There are many good resources out there, and I’m not particularly saying these are the greatest ever, but they’ve served me well. These are my recommendations; there are many like them, but these are mine.
Graphic Tutorials
Lode’s Graphic Tutorials
https://lodev.org/cgtutor/
Mystery (to me at least) website guy and maker of interesting projects, Lode Vandevenne, has a few gem graphic tutorials covering solid fundamentals and what I can really only categorize as demoscene effects.
Humus
http://www.humus.name/
Expert graphics programmer and AAA game developer, Emil Persson, has an extensive library of graphic algorithm demos and other cool stuff.
Hugo Alias
Archive.org backup
A roboticist with many good low-level graphics and effects tutorials, along with some pretty good simulation tutorials. The page was stagnant for over a decade, and then a few years ago, it ceased to exist. Luckily, Archive.org’s Wayback Machine has a working backup of it.
BlackPawn
https://blackpawn.com/blog/texts/
Demoscene graphics coder, Jim Scott, has a few interesting intermediate tutorials on graphics programming.
Iquilezles
https://www.iquilezles.org/www/index.htm
Inigo Quilez (demoscener, the creator of ShaderToy, and ex-Pixar Employee) has a large collection of graphics tutorials. There’s also quite a bit of information on distance field math and raytracing in the shader. The guy pretty much pioneered raytracing in realtime graphic APIs with shader code.
Scratchapixel
https://www.scratchapixel.com/
A large collection of computer graphics concepts and programming tutorials.
Art Tutorials
MiniBoss
https://blog.studiominiboss.com/pixelart
A large collection of quality art tutorials. Most of them focus on pixel art, but everything they have is easily translatable to generate art theory. Many of the tutorials are tiny animated GIFs. The tutorials cover pixel art, composition, animation, form, etc.
Music Tutorials
What is Music Theory
[Website][PDF]
It’s baffling how much production value there is on this much coverage of music theory – and it’s free! Not only free but Creative Commons.
Programming Tutorials
Flipcode
https://www.flipcode.com/archives/articles.shtml
The featured articles section of flipcode.com. Flipcode was a game developer community, active from the 90s to the early 2000s. Many of the topics are far lower-level than many would consider relevant in this day and age, but it’s a trove of concepts and algorithms for comp-sci, math, graphics, and simulations. While we’re usually abstracted from these types of low-level topics because of the vast arsenal of high-level tools we have these days, these are the kind of fundamentals that really allow you to have “x-ray” vision on your software.
It’s also a time-machine in that it contains articles from well-known graphics professors and researchers, such as Eric Haines, Jacco Bikker, Tomas Akenine-Mo¨ller, and Morgan McGuire.
Software
Blender 3D
https://www.blender.org/
One of the poster childs of open-source DCC software. Blender is a full-blown 3D package with mature support for modeling, animation, compositing, VFX, simulations, motion graphics, 3D sculpting, etc.
Inkscape
https://inkscape.org/
A vector graphics editor. This is my go-to tool for creating SVG files for laser cutting on the Glowforge.
Blogs
Realtime 3D
https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/
Eric Haine’s blog as extra material to the book he co-authors.
DataGenetics
http://datagenetics.com/blog.html
Former Facebook data scientist, Nick Berry, has an incredible page of technical articles covering a wide range of math, science, and comp-sci topics – usually assisted with interactive Processing demos.
Game From Scratch
[Link]
A web page and YouTube channel about game development tools.
Books
Pragmatic Programmer
[Amazon]
THE definitive book that comprehensibly walks the technical/non-technical line of topics about being a professional programmer. If you’re a professional programmer or if you plan to program professionally, this is mandatory reading.
How to THINK When You DRAW
[Link]
The Etherington Brothers run a blog with many quality art tutorials. How to THINK When You DRAW is a series of limited-run books only available as backer rewards on Kickstarter. But, the tutorial content is also accessible on the blog.
Real-Time Rendering
[Amazon]
A technical and conceptual crash course on all-things 3D graphics, but focusing more on real-time graphics. Co-authored by computer graphics professor Eric Haines; Electronic Arts senior graphics developer Naty Hoffman; and graphics researcher and professor Tomas Akenine-Mo¨ller.
How to Draw
[Amazon]
Industry concept artist and art teacher Scott Robertson has a two-part book series starting with How to Draw – which provides the basic technical fundamentals for accurately drawing forms. It essentially teaches drafting techniques and how to sketch like a CAD program with perspective and constructions.
Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach
[Amazon]
It’s an old book, but it’s still the bible for the fundamentals of programming systems to generate and modify computer graphics assets procedurally.
Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques
[Amazon]
The big book of animation programming. If you’re interested in low-level animation systems or programming animation tools, this is for you. If you’re interested in animation fundamentals and a little bit of animation programming, probably overkill.
Online Books
Clever Algorithms
[Online][Amazon]
A compact crash-course and cookbook for meta-heuristics and algorithms were made by taking effective strategies in nature and attempting to represent them in code. If you’re like me and like to mush words together, call it “intellectual bioprospecting.”
Essentials of Metaheuristics
[Website][Online][Amazon]
It covers a similar ballpark of topics as Clever Algorithms, but it’s pretty much an entire course textbook. While Clever Algorithm dominantly focuses on algorithms made from analogies, Essentials of Metaheuristics is a complete and thorough introductory walk-through of the field of heuristics (i.e., algorithms that consume incomplete and imperfect information and output predictions) and meta-heuristics (i.e., heuristics that optimize heuristics).
Immersive Math
http://immersivemath.com/
J. Ström, K. Åström, and T. Akenine-Möller (who has also contributed to Flipcode) have created an interactive online textbook about linear algebra. They registered an ISBN for it! I didn’t know you could register book numbers for websites.
Podcasts
Lex Fridman AI Podcast
[Website][YouTube]
In between teaching AI classes (and posting the lectures for free on YouTube) and doing post-doctoral research on self-driving cars, both at MIT, Lex Fridman interviews leading AI researchers, entrepreneurs, influencers thought provokers for his podcast.
Believe-you-me, you will not find anywhere where a leading AI researcher will talk with Whitney Cummings for over an hour on the responses she gets about the sex doll she made of herself and travels with.
NVidia AI Podcast
[Link]
Leading GPU manufacturer, Nvidia – with host Noah Kravitz, covers stories about how people use AI in business and projects of all scales and industries. They sometimes get technical and talk a little AI/deep-learning insider baseball. Still, it’s mostly soft-news stories that anyone can follow if they’re interested in how AI is being integrated into our lives and economy.
99 Percent Invisible
[Link]
A podcast that used to focus on design and the unintended consequences of good and bad design. These days it’s more about taking a deep dive into obscure and eccentric history stories.
YouTube
I spend an objectively irresponsible amount of time on YouTube. I’m a sucker for video essays; what can I say!
Two Minute Papers
[Link]
LuxRender contributor, Blender contributor, graphics and AI professor, Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, does short videos covering the newest research papers that come in AI, graphics, and animation computation.
Real Engineering
[Link]
A channel that does video essays on engineering and technology topics. The topics tend to focus on modern technology and World War 2 history.
New Mind
[Link]
A channel that does video essays on engineering and technology topics. The topics tend to focus on general concepts, involving deep dives that include history, fundamental, and advanced applications.
Online Schooling
“The old model of education where you got to college and coast for the rest of the 40 years of your career is not going to work. And all of us have to keep learning essentially every year or even every week for the rest of our lives if we want to have great careers.”
Andrew Ng
“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
Benjamin Franklin
These days I see a TON of Masterclass, Skillshare, Udemy, and Brilliant ads; I’ve never tried them, but there are some that I have tried and have had very enjoyably and fruitful results.
Udacity
https://www.udacity.com/
Created in 2012 by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun. The site was originally started with the question of what happens if I hosted a college-level robotics programming class, allowing anyone to join, all for free? In 2004 and 2005, his Standford team was the prize winner of DARPA self-driving car challenges. The original spark for Udacity was to make the skills needed for such specializations inexpensive and more accessible. Since then, they’ve integrated with corporate sponsors to create various vocational online tech degrees – with some courses and classes still being free.
Coursera
https://www.coursera.org/
Created in 2012 by Stanford professor (déjà vu) Andrew Ng. They originally started with the question, what would happen if I hosted a college-level machine learning class, allowed anyone to join, all for free (déjà vu…)? Since then, they’ve become an online platform for corporations and universities to host their own MOOC courses commercially.
Creative Live
https://www.creativelive.com/
I’ve used it for some mixing and mastering, typography, and some other misc topics. Sometimes the instructor will do their video lectures in an isolated way. More often, the videos will be an instructor in one of their small classrooms with a host, where the host and the small class will participate and ask questions. I actually like the small classroom route; the host and the class tend to ask the questions I’m thinking.
Khan Academy
[Pixar In a Box][Imagineering in a Box]
I’ve tried Khan Academy in the past and couldn’t really get into going through full classes, but I still think it’s cool they have a storytelling class hosted by Disney and a 3D graphics class hosted by Pixar. I’m not too familiar with them, but still super cool that it’s a thing. For example, free curriculum on Imagineering!? Where else do you get that?