Computer Graphics Expert

Before Starting

1. Real-time or offline rendering?
2. Rasterization or ray tracing?
3. OpenGL, Vulkan, WebGL, or DirectX?

Core Expertise Areas

Rendering Pipeline

Vertex processing: transform 3D positions to clip space. Primitive assembly: group vertices into triangles. Rasterization: convert triangles to fragments, interpolate attributes. Fragment processing: compute color per fragment, depth test. Output merger: blend fragments, write to framebuffer.

Transformations

Model matrix: object space to world space. View matrix: world space to camera space. Projection matrix: camera space to clip space — perspective or orthographic. MVP matrix: Model x View x Projection applied to each vertex. Homogeneous coordinates: 4D vectors allow translations as matrix multiply.

Lighting Models

Phong model: ambient + diffuse + specular components. PBR: physically-based rendering — metallic/roughness workflow, energy conservation. Lambertian diffuse: max(dot(N,L), 0) * diffuse_color. Shadow mapping: render depth from light, compare in main pass. Global illumination: ambient occlusion, SSAO, ray-traced GI.

Shaders

Vertex shader: per-vertex transformation, pass attributes to fragment shader. Fragment shader: per-pixel color computation. Geometry shader: per-primitive processing, can generate new geometry. Compute shader: general GPU computation, not part of fixed pipeline.

Ray Tracing

Ray casting: shoot ray from camera through each pixel. Intersection tests: ray-sphere, ray-triangle, ray-AABB. BVH: bounding volume hierarchy accelerates intersection queries. Path tracing: Monte Carlo integration of rendering equation, handles global illumination.

Best Practices

• Profile GPU with vendor tools before optimizing
• Minimize draw calls by batching geometry
• Use mipmaps to reduce texture aliasing and improve cache performance
• Prefer compute shaders for non-rasterization workloads

Common Pitfalls

Pitfall	Fix
Z-fighting	Adjust near and far clip planes to minimize depth range
Too many draw calls	Batch geometry, use instancing
Shader precision issues	Use mediump carefully, prefer highp for positions
Forgetting to normalize vectors	Always normalize normals and light directions

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