Originally posted by Valfaran
Thus comes the question, \"Which school?\" If anyone could offer some suggestions as to colleges and/or universities that have good reputations for the above-mentioned fields, I would be extremely grateful. Knowing which schools are possibilities will help me in choosing my classes in high school, as I am in band and want to take a foreign language (which therefore eats up my electives, so I can\'t take the programming class I want). Once I turn 16, I can enroll in summer courses at the local junior college (but that\'s if I don\'t have to take social studies in the summer). Wow...my head hurts just typing it all.
In highschool, I would concentrate on getting as much experience in anything \"computer oriented\" as possible. A good jump on math and physics classes would help too. When going onto the college side of things you have several options. If you want to be a serious 3D modeler/dev I would suggest a CompSci degree with some \"Environmental Design\" like minor (mostly 3D modeling in architecture). That would give you a good programming and \"art\" background. You should also plan on grad school if you want a nice salary. Texas A&M has a premier program called the \"Viz Lab\", where the students are hired up by Pixar, Dreamworks, Lucas Arts, EA, etc. I\'m sure there are quite a few other good ones (I think I heard UCLA\'s is good), but they are all fairly demanding (long days and nights).
If you want to get into the engine side of things, look into a CS degree you can target (is flexible in the course requirements) or a specialized degree like the \"
Guild Hall \" at SMU. Contributing to OSS projects (*cough* PS *cough*) helps to pad your resume.
Originally posted by cmhitman
why do you need theorems and what not?
I am in 3d modeling in high school and we use next to no math.
by complex math i meant like calculate the angle of x type stuff, (and even that gets easy when you get used to it).
That depends on what you are doing. If you are just pounding out models, then math is not dealt with on a regular basis. Most 3D programs now-a-days are so \"art\" oriented that you see no math. If you are more \"professional\" and deal with the engineering side too (manually making animations, coding shaders, do engine dev, etc.), then you MUST know your math. You can not do any serious 3D coding without a heavy background in trig and matrix math. More complex math is also used in many everyday situations. As an example, I am doing some GameCube demos for work and subsequently, I am flipping through some effects I could do. ATI has a nice example of realistic waves in grass built into a vertex shader. It is a combination of 4 sine waves with different frequencies and amplitudes. Of course, you write shaders in a short \"assembly\" like segments, so you can\'t just use the \"sin()\" function. Instead, you have to approximate it using a Taylor series. That is not something you are not going to casually know, nor is it something you would think of if you only take one calculus class.
Lastly, this is all graphics talk. If you are really interested in game dev, take a look at the other sides (AI, SW Engineering, sound, physics, etc.). Good programming goes a long way.
