Learning Programming for beginnners
polycounter lvl 10
After a lot of thought, I am thinking of trying my hands on learning programming. I am wondering if this is something that is going to be hard if u go the self taught route.
What has inspired me to do this is after seeing and reading about the work of Milo yip, the guy who was responsible for the hair and cloth simulation of Alice Madness. I am guessing he is obviously very good at what he does. Those simulations run smoothly even with crappy cpus.
I am mainly interested in programming for hair and cloth simulations as well as vfx such as smoke, fire, rain e.t.c especially in realtime circumstances.
I have realized most ppl who are very good in animation, effects or simulations usually know how to write a script or program. If u can do these things yourself, u can do anything. This is something i wish to learn on the side, might be very useful later.
Does anyone know of any good sites or pdfs I can start reading right away? I have already started on some max scripting. don't know if its the right one or is it java?Any recommendations will be really appreciated.
Thanks.
What has inspired me to do this is after seeing and reading about the work of Milo yip, the guy who was responsible for the hair and cloth simulation of Alice Madness. I am guessing he is obviously very good at what he does. Those simulations run smoothly even with crappy cpus.
I am mainly interested in programming for hair and cloth simulations as well as vfx such as smoke, fire, rain e.t.c especially in realtime circumstances.
I have realized most ppl who are very good in animation, effects or simulations usually know how to write a script or program. If u can do these things yourself, u can do anything. This is something i wish to learn on the side, might be very useful later.
Does anyone know of any good sites or pdfs I can start reading right away? I have already started on some max scripting. don't know if its the right one or is it java?Any recommendations will be really appreciated.
Thanks.
Replies
At first, you learn a simple language and make simple but polished projects with it.
If I had to start over, I'd begin with this: https://love2d.org
It uses Lua (a scripting language also used in several commercial games) and you can make 2D games with it. The goal here is to use the friendly environment it provides to learn logic and programming practices.
If you're not satisfied with Love2D, take a look at Processing: https://processing.org
You can make some serious visual effects experiments with this.
if you're interested you can start here
codecademy.com
It's sort of language like in its logic (and instead of &&, or instead of || and more elaborate stuff gets finished like... if x not in y: instead of if (std::find(y.begin(), y.end(), x) != y.end()) {} etc).
Is also loosely typed which makes it nice for quickly trying things out.
And most 3D apps support Python as a scripting language these days.
As for learning it... Codecademy is s good place to go for the basics, but other than that it's a cumulative process as mentioned. Google anything you need to know and generally someone somewhere has asked it before and has a good answer (stack exchange will become your friend).
Once you understand the general logic and structure, you can move on to typed languages like C++ or C#, which look pretty scary at first but make sense fairly quickly once you've prodded around.
But same as artwork, pick something very small to start with and work your way up. Jumping in at the deep end, especially with programming, can be a bit much to take in all at once.
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-mitx-6-00-1x-0
I have decided to learn python 3. I am a bit worried. I understand that python 3 differs from python 2. versions and some applications might not support python 3 since its a newer version. I am using 3dsmax 2014. Does 3dsmax 2014 support python 3?