Key Experience first ever graphics engine
- Significant experience gained in graphics pipelines, particularly with deferred shading
- Learned particle systems, multiple render targets, shading models, PBR, global illumination, radiosity, environment mapping, post processing and how to optimize large programs for low end hardware
- Scene management, camera management and geometry culling techniques such as octrees
- Subsystem organization
- Resource management and lifetimes
- Art pipelines for cooking assets into runtime objects
During high school and continuing into college, I became fascinated with 3D graphics pipelines and set out on a learning project to make my own. Many of the approaches were quite standard for the time, but I learned an enormous amount about organizing a 3D graphics system and the challenges that come with building something. This project also taught me that making pretty pictures is one thing. Fitting them into a game is an extremely different matter. Unfortunately, much of the media and code from this era was lost due to disk failures. I was able to recover some of the screenshots that I took at the time, however.
