Month: September 2014

Textures and Samplers in Metal

Textures are a central topic in rendering. Although they have many uses, one of their primary purposes is to provide a greater level of detail to surfaces than can be achieved with vertex colors alone.

In this post, we’ll talk about texture mapping, which helps us bring virtual characters to life. We’ll also introduce samplers, which give us powerful control over how texture data is interpreted while drawing. Along the way, we will be assisted by a cartoon cow named Spot.

You can download the sample code for this post here.

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Feature Sets and Capabilities

One of the changes made to the Metal API in the iOS 8 GM was the addition of the supportsFeatureSet: method to the MTLDevice protocol. The purpose of this method is to differentiate between devices powered by the A7 and A8 processor, because these chips offer different capabilities to Metal.

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Up and Running with Metal, Part 3: Lighting and Rendering in 3D

In this post, we’ll finally start rendering in 3D. In order to get there, we’ll talk about how to load 3D model data from disk, how to tell Metal to draw from a vertex buffer using indices, and how to manipulate objects in real time.

This post assumes that you know a little linear algebra. I have written an incomplete introduction to the subject in this post. There are also many excellent resources around the Internet should you need more information on a particular topic.

You can download the sample project for this post here.

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Linear Algebra for Graphics Programming

Introduction

This post will cover the essential mathematics for doing 3D graphics programming. I chose to split it out into a separate post because there is quite a lot of ground to cover, and attempting to wedge all of these concepts into a tutorial post would be overwhelming. If you already have a grasp of this material, this post is largely optional, but it does establish the notational and geometric conventions I use elsewhere.

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