P.S.
Anyone know a good forum for talking about programmer burnout? I’ve been looking around to see if anyone is heading down that road?
dbb: Check out “The Geometry Toolbox for Graphics & Modeling” by Farin & Hansford. It’s great. After that the “Computer Graphics Handbook” by Mortenson is a very handy book to keep on one’s desk.
Nickles: visual effects (TV or film + animation integrated with live actors) is a huge consumer of programmers with advanced math degrees. Also, now games is a huge consumer of advanced math and physics, surpassing the number of jobs and the level of the simulation that visual effects employ simply because the pretty pictures have to “actually operate” now. And then there’s scientific visualization, which is great because your job is to visualize scientists’ work- very stimulating!
Speaking as a person that has done all three I must point out: visualization is pretty much a 9 to 5 type job, visual effects is a 9 to 10 hour day with about a 6 week crunch twice a year (meaning 7 days a week), games is all over the unprofessional map with lazy starts and crazy endings of 18 hour days for months.
Along those same lines: scientific visualization has you working with scientists and researchers (generally a bit older, but with a nice age span), visual effects has you working with a nice spread of ages with the seniors being in their 40’s + you work with lots and lots of artists, while games is primarially under 30 with some older but not many, some artists but not nearly as many as visual effects.
If it is not clear yet, the “quality of work experience” goes 1) scientific visualization, 2) visual effects, 3) games. The self satisfaction with your work goes 1) visual effects, 2) games, 3) scientific visualization. Finally, difficulty of work goes 1) games, 2) visual effects, 3) scientific visualization.
I expect that games will mature at some point, but too much money is being made for the management of the game productions to change all that much. (The planning and management of game productions is a sick joke.) Plus the glut of young fanatic game programmers keeps the salaries lower than normal and the hours longer than normal simply because so many people want to “break into” the game industry.