Resources
This page contains a collection of graphics programming and adjacent resources curated by our meetup attendees.
New to graphics programming and don't know where to start? Check our curated beginner friendly resources.
Want to add a resource? See guide for adding resources.Learn OpenGL is the definitive resource for learning real-time renderer techniques as beginners. Even though it is an OpenGL tutorial, it also teaches rendering techniques at the same time.
Series of online books teaching the basics of path tracing
A comprehensive introduction to various topics in computer graphics
The course nicely fills the gap between a Ray Tracing in One Weekend style toy renderer and a more general and fully-fledged renderer that PBRT describes
Comprehensive reference on physically based rendering techniques
Writing a software rasterization from scratch to demonstrate how graphics APIs work.
Free book that contains chapters on physically-based shading and rendering, coding projects, and reference pages.
A course that introduce GPU parallel programming with a Computer Graphics flavor
It is a good idea to keep it open while doing Vulkan programming
A blog post series delving into building a BVH from scratch
A guide about avoiding common programmer errors by using modern OpenGL (4.5+)
The goal of this guide is to understand Vulkan correctly, and act as a stepping stone for then working in your own projects.
PBRT book chapter on how to build a BVH
An introduction to Monte Carlo ray tracing
An improvement of the official OpenGL documentation
Summarizes the problem of GPU line primitives and explores a few different techniques for 2D and 3D triangulated line rendering, and accompany each with a small canvas demo.
A tutorial for the WebGPU API using Rust and the wgpu library
Basic tutorial on shadow mapping
Like other "gems" books, this series of books contains a collection of articles focused on ray tracing techniques for serious practitioners. It focuses on subjects commonly considered too advanced for introductory texts, yet rarely addressed by research papers.
The classic Kajiya rendering equation paper introduced the "rendering equation" and the path tracing algorithm
Lecture series on Vulkan programming from TU Wien
An introduction to 2D and 3D computer graphics using WebGL2 by Gregg Tavares
This is Turner Whitted's original Ray Tracing paper
An overview various variance reduction techniques for Monte Carlo rendering, covering bidirectional path tracing, Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, MIS, stratified Sampling, low-discrepancy sampling, blue noise, photon mapping, and finite element radiosity
The official WebGPU API specification
Builds on the foundation from "Drawing Lines is Hard" and uses instance rendering to draw lines
The book focus on cover fundamental 3D math concepts for beginners
Excellent overview paper on BVH
A glossary of terms used in compute shader programming. Provides cross-API comparisons
Continues instanced line rendering, introducing alpha-blending for triangulated lines.
Four part lecture on essential math for game developers by Freya Holmér
Blog post series on implementing a CPU rasterizer from scratch
Introduces the theory of tone mapping and discusses commonly used tone mapping operators
the Academy Award-winning Ph.D. thesis by Eric Veach. It starts from bidirectional light transport algorithms and introduces multiple importance sampling and Metropolis light transport
A relatively small, beginner-friendly path tracing tutorial using Vulkan's ray tracing API
An advanced book focused on light transport theory for global illumination.
A blog post on implementing a hybrid ray tracing rendering pipeline
Public Domain materials for Physically Based Rendering
Classic paper introducing a fast and simple filter for ray tracing denoising.
An interactive introduction to barycentric coordinates. It starts with linear-interpolation and generalize it to triangles and higher-dimensions.
Great overview, and also spend significant time on the half-edge data structure
A visual explanation of floating-point depth buffer precision, and introduces nonlinear depth mapping
An explanation of direct lighting and next event estimation in ray tracers
Best practices for writing a high-performance Vulkan renderer
A stackoverflow answer on why the Gimbal lock occurs
Describes forward/defered shading techniques and various tradeoffs
A paper describing high-performance software rasterization techniques running on GPUs.
A minimalist tutorial from Sascha Willems on how to use the Vulkan graphics API in 2026. The idea is to get people started with rasterization in Vulkan using commonly supported features to make the API easier to use.
Explores combining rasterization and ray tracing for shadow rendering
Free online linear algebra book with fully interactive figures
A tutorial on implementing SSAO
Learn OpenGL guest article on cascaded shadow mapping, which resolves the resolution issues of the naive shadow mapping
Introduced wavefront path tracing
This repository provides a comprehensive learning resource for Vulkan ray tracing, featuring a progressive step-by-step tutorial that transforms a rasterization application into a fully functional ray tracing implementation
A classic reference on implementing a work-efficient parallel prefix sum algorithms
NVIDIA paper introducing Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS), based on shadow mapping and percentage‐closer filtering (PCF)
The author introduces shaders from an artistic perspective, and the book covers many topics that more engineering-focused resources such as "Learn OpenGL" won't cover.
Single-header zero-dependency BVH construction and traversal library
A great intereactive introduction/refresher for quaternions. It focuses on intuition rather than mathematical definitions
This tutorial shows how to use the VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension in Vulkan. It shows the steps required to load the extension, use it, and how it affects related components such as pipeline creation
A book that covers and compares both the OpenGL and Vulkan APIs, while also covering various recipes about making a renderer.
Introduces math routines with implementations. It also touches Grassman algebra
comprehensive range of mathematical techniques and problem-solving strategies associated with computer graphics
This book challenges you to build a Whitted-style ray tracer from scratch. Unlike many tutorials, it doesn't provide code and follows a unique test-first approach, describing only test specifications and algorithms.
