Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

Physically Based Rendering is basically a complete guide to building a modern physically based rendering engine (it even won an Academy Award) https://pbrt.org/

I sort of know this area.... There two separate paths -- realtime or non-real-time. For non-real-time there is: http://www.pbrt.org/ For real-time there is this: http://www.realtimerendering.com/ Neither book gets into the details of the specific API, they are theoretical. Real-time techniques change nearly complete about every 10 years because GPUs get faster and render more techniques possible and obsolete the older less good looking techniques.

If you're interested in something that's not strictly real-time a good book is physically based rendering http://www.pbrt.org/ . It uses a literate-programming style which is neat. It's about path-tracing which is similar to ray-tracing but can give an unbiased approximation to the rendering equation (which is a reasonably accurate model of "everyday" optics.) Here is a JS+WebGL (mostly WebGL ;) ) interactive path-tracer: http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/ --- Vulkan is pretty boring to be honest. I'm very doubtful that you want to bother with it if you're just starting. Using these APIs is like filling out tax forms, but Vulkan is a lot more effort than OpenGL (but, OpenGL is weird...) Learning shaders in OpenGL will be pretty transferable knowledge. Vulkan uses a lower-level assembly-like language, SPIR-V that doesn't pretend to be C (like GLSL) but there are GLSL to SPIR-V compilers. I can't comment on DX (I haven't used it.)…

I would not advise anyone to try to get into computer graphics directly with the Vulkan or DX12 APIs. Start with DX11, modern OpenGL and/or WebGL, and work through your computer graphics theory (and a lot of practice) using those. Geometry, illumination, shaders, tools and GPU computation will take a lot of time to master. When you decide you want to go into low level APIs, if you are comfortable with Apple systems, Metal will likely be easier than Vulkan/DX12. A lot of the theory from classic books is still valid, so even a copy of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice will look fine on your desk. "Real Time Rendering" by Moller/Haines and "Physically Based Rendering" by Pharr are excellent. "Game Engine Architecture" by Gregory and "Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics" by Lengyel will probably prove very useful and relevant to you as well.…

Physically Based Rendering – From Theory to Implementation doesn't necessarily have the reader build a project, but it explains its reference implementation very well, and you could go ahead and write your own in parallel based on it. http://www.pbrt.org/