Hi everyone,
I’ve recently started at a new job (yay!) and am loving it much more than my last studio. However, I’m finding that while my skill set works fine for 80% or so of the new job, I am finding some gaps now that I’m actually here and it is becoming quite apparent that I need some more depth in the area of graphics.
For some background, I have a computer science education and my areas of expertise have been in pipeline tools, asset management, and particle effects. Have never really been called on to do much rigging, technical animation, or shader writing. Lately though I’m finding general graphics stuff like shaders, compressing textures, lightmap baking, etc to be in demand.
I am seeing now how much of a benefit it would be to my team for me to pick up graphics knowledge. For example:
-Shader writing (Cg)
-Texture formats and compression
-GPU hardware
-Sorting, transparency, blending
-Render to texture (not just what it is, but WHEN and WHY it is useful)
-Lighting and rendering, shadows, dynamic lighting, etc
-The various buffers
-Draw calls, batching
-3d meshes and tri counts, especially in regard to performance
-…also how all this pertains to mobile 
The problem is, I’m a busy guy… I’m working overtime lately which is fine, but not conducive to picking up new skills in my free time. I’m not aiming to get a graphics engineer level of depth, but at least enough trivia and practice to address a majority of the daily problems without needing to call in an engineer, which is very hard to do these days due to how busy and tight our schedule is.
So, short of going back to school, what are the best resources you’ve found for picking up knowledge in these areas? I’m hoping to get some recommendations on books, tutorial series, anything I can digest in bite-sized chunks of time after I’ve come home and collapsed on the couch. Thanks!