CG Basics
Info
Introduction
License / Contact
Changelog
General
Debugging
Problem-solving
Rendering
Sampling
Raytracing [wip]
Global Illumination
Linear Workflow
Fresnel
Tonemapping
Albedo and photorealism
PBR
Portals
Unbiased
Secondary ray clamping
Self-Illum / Direct light
Noise from light placement
Reflective GI caustics
BRDF / BSDF
Bucket / Progressive
Bit depth
Modelling
Triangulation
Normals
Smoothing groups
Weighted normals
Overlapping faces
T-vertices
Non-manifold geometry
Baking
Tangent space
Dithering
Padding
Realtime
Rasterizing
Overdraw
Channel packing
Texturing / Shading
Mip-mapping
Vertex painting
Premultiplication
Filtering / Blur
UDIMs
Triplanar
Animation
Gimbal lock



---------------------------
Imprint | Impressum
Privacy policy | Datenschutz
www.racoon-artworks.de

Introduction

[ This website is still work in progress. Grayed out links in the menu on the left are not yet completed ]

TL;DR

This website is intended to provide a quick general overview of common terminology and meaning in the computer graphics world. All topics are explained in an high level manner and provide links to additional reading material for further studies and in-depth technical explanation.

The problem

https://xkcd.com/722/ (CC BY-NC 2.5)

The idea for this website was born when I tried to explain a technical concept to another artist, using the same analogies as I always use. Many artists, especially new ones, lack a certain grounding in terminology and general concepts. Ranging from a basic understanding of sampling and rendering techniques to modelling or baking game models.
It's not due to a lack of interest but the mere fact that they have never come into contact with the term or the underlying idea. So artists know that something isn't working as expected but have no idea how to solve it or where to get started.

The idea

The main purpose of this website is to provide a quick overview of common terminology. Each topic is explained in an high level manner and provides reading material for further studies and in-depth technical explanation. It is not meant to be a thorough investigation of how exactly things work under the hood. You could say it's the opposite of a typical technical wikipedia article where the average artist is unable to understand the important bits because everything is explained with math instead of actual visual examples.
All topics are meant to be as software-agnostic as possible. I am, however, naturally biased towards the workflows I know, so specific software packages may handle things differently than what I assume is universal.

The main takeaway should be an understanding of the concepts and being able to identify problems or render artifacts and know how to deal with them or how to look for a solution.
It is generally advisable to read topics from top to bottom, at least per category, since many concepts build upon each other.

How you can help

If you find any mistakes (especially factual), miss an important detail in the explanation or if you have ideas for more topics, please let me know: Contact.