hey, for general understanding of how all these things work refer to
https://www.pbrt.org/ ....
and yeah it all might be a little hard for an artist but only if he isn't interested.....
so if you want to learn all these things, go for it.....if you go straight into mdl you won't get anything cause they just have all the work already done. so when you go to nvidia to learn mdl you only get to know what functions are available and nothing on how they work........
..if you learn the theory behind them, it becomes universal to your mind....then be it glsl or mdl or any shading language concepts are everywhere same
and explaining all the nodes explicitly is not at all a good idea...cause if your base is clear then they all are related to each other and even becomes self explanatory....
happy learning......
