Would love to know about your beginnings in graphics programming

[Please let me know if this kind of questions do not come under this category / this forum). I’ve recently been looking into graphics programming a lot and wanted to know how some of you all have gotten into this niche (which api’s, etc). I would love to be able to contribute to blender someday, and not sure which path should I take.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

Hey Tarun_R, I answered a similar question a while back perhaps you’ll find this useful.

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Everyone’s path is going to be a bit different, but for me it was a convergence of things I was interested in. I had a programming background and I became interested in writing shaders. Writing shaders required a bit more of an understanding of how renderers worked, which requires some research (aka: the rabbit hole effect). Next thing you know you’re rolling your own comically inefficient raytracer “for fun”.

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To answer your question a little more directly, I’d suggest a different approach than considering API’s etc early on.

Choose an area you’d like to develop, then to try to solve an interesting problem in that area.
Once your doing something tangible you’ll need to figure out which technologies/API’s etc to use, those kinds of dissensions often fall into place once you’re doing something practical.

Very early on you’ll probably need to work on some toy-projects (things that are so basic they’re unlikely to be useful to others), that can still be done with the aim in mind of doing something bigger.

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We had a very similar thread not too long ago, where I gave more or less the same advise. Don’t worry too much about all the things you need to know before you’ll be “a successful blender developer” just pick an area you are interested in and start tinkering, things will likely not work out your first X tries, which is great, you’re learning new things, even if it’s how not to do something.

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