(Part 2) Top products from r/GraphicsProgramming

Computer Graphics is a very broad field. There are subfields, such as the various types of rendering, animation, physically based animation, computational fabrication, human computer interaction and so on... It even has a very blurry interface with robotics !

What I understand you are interested in is a summarized theory of real-time rendering techniques.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any good book, besides RTR (which is awfully outdated) that will go through it all in details, up to how games do rendering these days. What I found particularly confusing when I started learning, is that nothing is really ever told as a story, but rather a multitude of short novels, and for that GPU PROs are the absolute best, written by the absolute best in the industry.

What should really help you, is to ramp up on the mathematics behind game rendering, as that is the absolute core that will unlock everything.
For that, this book should be very helpful.

edit #38:
What I would really suggest is you commit on buying RTR in August and in the meantime less legal way to access that knowledge online. Not that the previous suggestions still stand as RTR will not teach you all you need to learn in enough details (imho).

> don't make games. Implement complex rendering tech.

Great advice, this mirrors my experience.

>I though I was pretty good so I switched to Vulkan, which absolutely kicked my ass. It took me about a year to get back comfortable with Vulkan, during which I learned a ton about the intricacies of modern GPUs.

Same, but with D3D12 for me. A low-level API for the graphics pipeline and Professional CUDA Programming for the compute side is a great combination.

.FBX is one of the most used formats in the industry, what usually happens is the artists output their work into .FBX files and either the engine loads it directly, or will convert it to a proprietary format that's most efficient for their engine. Unfortunately information on .FBX is not publicly available so you have to use their SDK.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=10775847
http://docs.autodesk.com/FBX/2014/ENU/FBX-SDK-Documentation/

.OBJ is not a suitable format for animation it's only good for defining meshes and materials. A very good library that removes all the hassle of format loading is Assimp: http://www.assimp.org/

Lastly, animation formats don't store individual vertex positions, it will store matrix transformations. It's worth looking into how animation is done, I don't have any links but I would recommend looking at the following books:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory/1568814135

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Game-Coding-Complete-Mike-McShaffry/dp/1133776574

Real Time Rendering was recommended to me by a few professional graphics devs when I asked them the same question. This is NOT a light read, and it won't tell you how to use a specific API (DirectX, OpenGL), but it will give you the foundations to better understand an entire graphics pipeline and the various techniques used.

Other posters have mentioned starting with a software rasterizer. I'd highly suggest this as it helped me a lot when I had to do a very small one in college. There is a more recent version that is likely better(haven't looked yet), but this is the book we used and it can be picked up for dirt cheep!

I learned from the infamous "Red Book". But, that was long, long ago in a university far, far away. Even the 7th edition of that book only covers OGL 3.1... These days, any of the tutorials in the sidebar of r/OpenGL would be good.