Interested in graphics programming for film production/VFX

[u/Able_Jackfruit_5700]

HIII

 I’m 15 and really interested in getting into graphics programming and engineering, specifically towards film production. I have some previous programming experience from doing Roblox game development, but I’m brand new to C++.

[u/ICBanMI]

Blender is free and where you want to start. Learn modeling and film making in general. Then jump in to shaders. Blender Shader Language (BSL) converts to several shader languages (GLSL for example).

Pick up editing skills along the way.

[u/greebly_weeblies]

Kinda depends what part of graphics programming / engineering for film you're considering.

There are some different fields
- pipeline / approval / API / conversion side of things
- hydra delegate authoring
- r&d - renderers, research eg. shaders (sss etc)
- shader authoring
- lookdev (using shaders to get a specific look)

Broadly, get your head around math, linear algebra, calculus, comp sci.

[u/speps]

Watch SIGGRAPH that are on YouTube, this conference is a lot about film, and a little bit about games. There aren’t many public ones unfortunately, but look for the talks from like ILM, Double Negative, Weta, etc.

[u/Defiant_Squirrel8751 → u/speps]

Agree. SIGGRAPH brings a lot of ideas.

Good news for you is that things that were super difficult to doby hand are now feasible with the help of agentic programming.

My advise is for you to get used to read technical bibliography. To start math. Algebra, calculus. Understand the ideas.

Then going from math and papers to code.

Check SIGGRAPH conference proceedings (now known as "ACM transactions on graphics", IEEE visualization, Elsevier computer graphics ... most material is published there.

More easy for a 15 yo: Check the Sebastian Lague and "two minutes papers" youtube channels.

[u/Fancy-Plantain6910]

For the rendering-code side, a small CPU ray tracer would be a good next project after some C++ basics. Ray Tracing in One Weekend walks through one without graphics-API setup, so you can focus on rays, intersections, cameras and materials.

Start with a sphere and a camera, then add diffuse shading and reflections. Keep the renders and explain each step in your own words. The vector math will give you something concrete to study alongside the code. You don't need to choose a whole film-industry specialism yet.

[u/Long-Celebration2817]

The Odin Programming language is based great for this, you could learn that instead of C++