Halfway through. What landed, what did not, and what I am going to do differently in the second half. I move the Reflection post up by one day since I was not able to collect all images and text for what I actually had planned, so hopefully I am able to post it tomorrow.
Block 2 was heavy. Not in a bad way, but heavy in the way that happens when you dig into a topic and suddenly realize how much you didn't actually know about it.
Two weeks on real-time rendering: wider surface area than it looks. I knew most of the terms, but this block was about pressure-testing that, and it cracked in plenty of places. I was also picking up LaTeX along the way. My math skills are poor at the best of times.
The more deeply you try to understand something, the less certain you feel about it. I'm starting to think that's just what real learning feels like.
More intense than the previous block: real-time rendering is broad and I was trying to cover a lot of it. Quick explainers kept ending up at 350+ words because I wanted to give the full picture: cause, context, tradeoffs, solutions. That's probably right, but it's a pacing problem. The question is whether to pull back or split topics across multiple posts. Not sure where to go with that next.
What landed
The posts that had visual examples held up better than the ones that were purely text. The gamma correction and IBL deep dives felt complete because there was something to anchor the explanation to. The specular aliasing post worked for the same reason. Where I had a diagram or a before/after comparison, the concept came across. Where I didn't, it just read like a long explanation you had to take on faith. Again, the tradeoff of writing at pace.
What flopped
A few posts tried to cover too much ground. The AO and bent normals post is the clearest example. It started as a quick format and ended up going two or three levels deeper than planned initially. The output was fine but it took far longer to write than it should have, and I'm not sure the extra length was worth the cost.
What I'll do differently
Split topics earlier rather than discovering mid-write that a post needs to be two posts. If the outline has more than three distinct ideas, it's probably two posts. I'd also rather have a short post with one good visual than a long post with none. That's the adjustment I plan going into the second half.
© 2026 Stefan Groenewoud - All views are my own, not those of my employer.