One of my courses at Uni last year was Computer Graphics, and the second half of the course was the 3D graphics part, it went through all sorts of different stuff, and it's not that bad. Of course, if you really want to go from scratch that's even more fun. We started first off with how the eye works and an overview of colour theory. When we moved onto the actual computer bits of graphics, we started with "How to draw a line", then "How to draw circles/ellipses", "How to draw filled polygons", clipping, polygons infront of/behind other polygons, how to resolve circular overlappings (A obscures B obscures C obscures A), bezier curves, XORing, bit transfers, 2D transformations, ... so when you want to get right down to the real nitty gritty (if you're turning your back on the Direct3D functions, why not turn your back on the VB line function? lol) you've got to decide where to stop.