At the GDC 2019 Edition of the “Technical Lens” Roundtable, I kicked off the session with a question about whitepapers. In particular I asked about what methods we use to decern information from these dense nuggets of knowledge.
TL;DR (from what I recall); Ignore the math if you can, and just understand the concept or Google/Github. There is often someone who is already playing around with the concept that you can parse data from if the Whitepaper is too dense for your current knowhow.
But! Diabolically in secret (
)… or whatever… the true reason for asking that question was a curiosity of what my fellow VFX artists do to learn and understand these relatively tough concepts generally. I said “Whitepaper” because it was a Tech Talk. Two birds one stone. Either way, both general topics are interesting, and I wanted to extend the topic to the forums (like the flowmap topic has been)!
SO! Realtime VFX forum posters;
- What do you do to learn VFX concepts quickly?
And/Or
- What do you do to understand the dense and often cutting edge information presented in whitepapers?