Vidya development

I'm being serious, this isn't a troll thread or whatever.

Im interested in developing games using C++ and OpenGL. My question however is, where do I even start? In a cg artist, so rigging/animating low poly models and creating landscapes isn't an issue. Can I even learn all this without going through a college CS course? What are the things I need to know (optimization, vector math, etc)? Any recommended books?

I suggest finding a game engine that will meet your needs, as building a game engine from scratch is a very intensive task. Granted, once your first functioning scalable game engine, you're set for pretty much anything in that field. There are some open source game engines. I haven't used any, so I can't give any personal recommendations, but the screen shots for Orge3D look pretty impressive. But if you would like to teach yourself the math you'll need, then get through this list:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(mathematics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_matrix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_product
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_product
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_projection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_angles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternions_and_spatial_rotation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSP_(file_format)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_detection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kd_tree
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_response
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_finding

It'll take a long time to learn it, and it would take a long time to implement a full game engine, but it could be useful for you as a 3D artist to be aware of some of these things.