Hi,

I am a self taught Graphics/Shader programmer. In India, we don't get luxury of having university courses dedicated to Games or Graphics. By the time you get good at math, you don't even know why you are doing Laplace's transfom & where it is used in pratice... Its just the fact that "How is this done?" made me take up graphics programming & C++ to learn new exciting stuff ...

My Story so far ...

1. Get overwhelmed by seeing what people have been doing, wondering how they did it

2. Study, take each topic at once, there is a huge mountain to climb & you always start at the base

3. Get more overwhelmed as each day passes by

4. Study more, implement stuff, keep learning

5. Even more overwhelmed

6. Tell it to yourself that one day you will reach there .... (After all , this journey has been awesome knowing there is still so much to learn ! )

Cheers.

I am a self taught programmer. I started by following tutorials (text based), but usually they are quite boring so I usually quit quickly. Then I followed an extensive video course, which went very in depth, although I didn't understood much it still taught me the basics. I learned the most from messing around with code from others. Just experiment! that would be my advice!

wow, you guys are all very cool. I'm just a newbie to graphics and I'm self-taught.

I'm totally self-taught.

Learnt BASIC on a C64 at age 9, then a bit of 6502 ASM after 12, toyed a bit with sprites and tiles but never made a game.

Later I had an Amiga 500 and did some 68000 ASM, toyed with the copper and blitter a bit but also never made a game.

Didn't program for a long time after Commodore went bust and only had my first PC, a Pentium III 667 Mhz at age 23 but never programmed on it. It's only much later, about 2 years ago (I'm 37) after self-teaching myself calculus II & III and differential equations and linear algebra that I realised I was finally able to understand what went into 3D games and decided to give DirectX a shot.

I learnt C, C++ and did the Rastertek tutorials, all of them, after briefly learning DX 9 and the FFP first. The rest is history :-)

Self-taught, learned programming(a bit c,c++,delphi) out of boredom and well wanted to mod Half-Life back then^^

Quckly got into OpenGL and such mainly because i like to recreate things i see without knowing how it's done :D

Yup. Started properly when I was about 12 (years before that if you include messing around with BASIC on school computers). First major step was learning C via a book and hacking mode 13h :D Then learnt Z80 ASM building home-brew Gameboy games which lead to my first job. I have no formal qualifications (I did a year at art collage and dropped out). I'm now 32 and have worked on everything from console to desktop to mobile to web, with jobs in games industry, advertising and general application programming. The last few years I've been writing games and apps largely for mobile using my own GL engine. This year I switched over to Unity.

People always ask me for book recommendations but (excluding that very first C book - way before having internet access) I've always learnt by reading other peoples code/articles and hacking away at stuff until it clicks.

Sounds nice but where are the pictures from your engine?

All I see are photos of various objects.

L. Spiro

All I see are photos of various objects

Nice to hear that renders looks like photo
It's Physically Based Renderer, so it solves Rendering Equation with maximum precision and gives realistic images.
Renderer is under development
You can find more info here and here

Im talking about people with no cs degree or formal education in it. How were you able to pick up the material and what challeneges did you face? Do you do it as a living or just a hobby?

I learned everything myself without a degree. I've been to university but i can safely say i learned nothing about programming there that i didn't already know. The things i learned were about maths, time management and how to live as an adult.

Twelve years on, and I now work in programming and in IT as both the IT manager and software developer of a mid-sized company. The things you do best in are those things you learn yourself as that demonstrates you have the motivation to see it to the end, rather than someone else telling you "you WILL learn this and you WILL like it, or else".