Hi,
It is a wide question, I’ll assume you want to focus on real-time rendering engineer, here are some interesting things to learn and investigate yourself (probably incomplete):
- Learn how to submit work to the GPU. OpenGL is a bit old but still good to learn (I started with OpenGL 1.2
). I’d suggest DX11 because it is also nice and simple and still has lots of modern features. After that dx12 would be a natural next step (ray tracing, mesh shaders, etc.). If you do not want to do that, use an engine like unreal as a start base. - Learn ray tracing as you did is good! That is the way to go. PBRT is a great book!
- Learn about shading: gpu gems, real time rendering books. (materials, lighting, translucency, volumetrics)
- Learn about post process (bloom, depth of field, tone mapping)
- Learn about animation and simulation (skeletal, particles, fluids)
- learn about high end tech: read papers from conference: SIGGRPAH, i3D, Eurographics, HPG.
Pick a few things you like and combine them: render animated mesh with your rendered or generate lightmap for you ray tracer, etc. Try to see how you con optimize some code. Create projects and share them online for anyone to see and learn from you. That is also some sort of online port folio demonstrating your interests.
There are also lots of developers on twitter to follow and learn from.
I hope those few ideas will help you.