Wrote 3D games and simulations. That forced me to go through the full pipeline end to end.
Also UC Davis professor Key Joy's Computer Graphics course [1] is the best intro course on 3D graphics programming, covering many key concepts and math. I found it better than any other courses from MIT/Berkeley/CMU/etc. It doesn't have some of the newer techniques in recent years but is still very much relevant and forms the foundational knowledge to level up.
