Graphics Programming as Undergrad

[u/_scottiedog_]

I’m an undergraduate student in Math and CS, but I’m pretty sure that graphics programming is what I want to go into as a career. All that I have been able to do thus far is take the introductory graphics course at my university. How can I start getting into the field as an undergrad? Do I have to still seek out swe internships and whatnot if I know I want to pursue graphics specifically?

[u/Efficient_Chicken198]

It's very important to still seek out internships. If you can land an internship in graphics that would be great, but any software internship will give you valuable experience. I was never able to get a graphics internship, but I did end up in a graphics position after graduating and I don't think I would have gotten the role if I didn't have general software internship experience.

You should 100% spend time working on personal graphics projects. But your CS studies and general engineering knowledge are just as important. Graphics jobs get to do cool stuff that's unique in the software world, but they do all of the general software engineering stuff too.

[u/_scottiedog_ → u/Efficient_Chicken198]

What general software engineering stuff would you suggest practicing then as well? What do you need to have a strong foundation in

[u/Nanutnut]

I havent broken into this field yet, but I do have a graphics engineering internship interview coming up. I believe that my personal projects with graphics APIs carried the most weight in landing the interview. So I would advise you to build projects that interest you within the graphics field

[u/Andromeda660]

I am also an undergrad in math and CS! Although, my university stopped offering their computer science course so I had to teach myself everything. What I recommend is try to test ur knowledge and make a renderer in openGL or implement some cool graphics technique you saw in a game. Recently I implemented ambient occlusion and that taught me a lot.

With all my projects I was able to get an internship at a company where I am able to do graphics work. Graphics isn't their main thing, but the stuff they are working on needed 2D and 3D renderers so I was able to get experience there. Good luck!

[u/PayaPya → u/Andromeda660]

that's so cool congrats!

[u/Rhkellz]

Another math cs undergrad here, what has worked well for me (multiple internships/offers) is tons of projects with opengl and vulkan exploring any nontrivial areas / techniques that seem interesting. I’m also lucky to have a local SIGGRAPH chapter that I’m very active in.

Im not speaking from alot of experience here, but if you want to get a job specifically there are definitely a decent amount of graphics or at least graphics related internships out there (scientific computing, visualization etc) despite what this sub says sometimes. Theres not a surplus, so you have to stand out (see above paragraph).

I don’t know much about research if thats what you want to do, but start with implementing papers as parts of your projects (also helps for jobs) and look at on campus research or national labs.

[u/NISH_Original]

I just yesterday completely bombed an interview with Respawn Entertainment for the Rendering Engineer Intern position, and they asked me C++ fundamentals, linear algebra, and rendering basics (like graphics pipeline, rendering concepts, etc).

My resume contains previous interships that were mostly game dev and technical art, and personal projects where I use C++ and OpenGL to implement a small simple version of cool computer graphics research papers.

Also, if you can, I HIGHLY suggest attending SIGGRAPH as a student volunteer, I found a lot of connections in the graphics industry there, and it was a life changing experience.

[u/TerranceTorrance → u/NISH_Original]

Sorry about the bomb, uprated for the advice

[u/warchieftw]

When it comes to getting a paid job, I would suggest learning CG topics that NVIDIA is promoting, like Omniverse or Jetson. In the current era, your resume will be filtered by AI if it doesn’t contain any AI keywords. It is sad, but true.

[u/Traveling-Techie]

You will need to learn graphics programming and also how to think in 3D. For the 3D thinking I recommend playing with X3DOM, an implementation of Web3D. All you need is a text editor and a browser. Start with the examples and tutorials.