After the Tutorial: Where to Continue your Graphics Programming Journey - Mike Shah GPC 2025

Mike Shah discusses how to transition from basic graphics tutorials to building a complete, structured rendering framework.

There exist many great courses, tutorials, and books that describe the fundamentals of graphics programming with various graphics APIs like OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, etc. However, the next chapter often missing from tutorials, is how to start building a rendering pipeline that puts these features into a unified framework. In this talk, I will discuss 'the next chapter' of the graphics programming tutorial that describes how to build a rendering framework: automatically parsing uniforms, handling materials, uniting the compute and graphics shaders, navigating the screen tree, and bringing order to a graphics pipeline that has multiple passes over a series of frames. This talk is targeted towards folks who are newer to graphics programming with an API, but who otherwise have dabbled enough to have implemented the phong illumination model. After leaving this talk, audience members will have a path forward toward implementing a graphics framework, and otherwise understanding graphics architecture talks with big pipelines.