I am working with Unreal Engine material editor for my most shaders and substance designer too. I would like to go ahead with HLSL. For learning HLSL scripting do I learn Linear algebra? I know a few things in the matrix but I am not so good at that. The same concern for PyMEL too. I am a max user tho.
Linear Algebra and some basic Trig will be super helpful to understand and know about the different equations/functions/identities.
You don’t have to completely know and memorize all the equations/functions etc by heart but really just knowing about the different properties of each and to have an intuition of how they are working geometrically will be incredibly helpful.
The last thing you want to do when writing shaders is accidentally reinvent something that already exists in mathematics the hard way.
There is a YouTube playlist Math For Game Developers by Jorge Rodriguez that is incredibly helpful.
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