In this article, I will outline how to render high dynamic range (HDR) video with Metal. In contrast to rendering standard dynamic range (SDR) content, where we can sometimes get away without paying too much attention to color management, there are many important subtleties to rendering HDR colors accurately. A lot of the heavy lifting […]
Rendering HDR Video with AVFoundation and Metal Read More »
In this article, we’ll discuss how to create and render 3D text with Metal. Most applications need to render text, and there are many techniques for drawing 2D text with graphics APIs, from pre-rasterized font atlases, to signed-distance field methods like Chris Green’s seminal work at Valve or GLyphy, to cutting-edge vector-based solutions like Slug.
Rendering 3D Text with Core Text and libtess2 Read More »
In this article, we’ll take a look at a portion of the ModelIO framework we haven’t used so far: materials. In previous articles, we’ve used ModelIO to do the heavy lifting of loading 3D geometry, but have loaded and applied textures manually. This ad hoc approach works when we only have a base color map,
Rendering Physically-Based ModelIO Materials Read More »
In this article, we will discuss a method for rendering high-fidelity text with Metal. It’s easy to overlook text rendering when thinking about 3D graphics. However, very few games or applications can get by without displaying any text, so it’s important to consider how we can best use the GPU to incorporate text into our
Rendering Text in Metal with Signed-Distance Fields Read More »
In this article, we will discuss an important technique for efficiently drawing many objects with a single draw call: instanced rendering. This technique helps you get the most out of the GPU while keeping memory and CPU usage to a minimum. The sample app for this post renders several dozen animated cows moving on top
Instanced Rendering in Metal Read More »
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,
Textures and Samplers in Metal Read More »
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.
Up and Running with Metal, Part 3: Lighting and Rendering in 3D Read More »
Welcome back to our ten-year retrospective on the Metal API. You can read the first part here. This post will cover the last five years of Metal’s evolution as an enabling platform technology and bring us up to the present day. 2020 – Raytracing Redux 2020 was the year of the A14 Bionic, the powerhouse
A Decade of Metal: The Modern Era (2020–Today) Read More »
Introduction In 2014, when Apple introduced the Metal graphics API, the landscape of computer graphics APIs was dominated by long-established standards like OpenGL. Seismic shifts were afoot, however, with the announcement of DirectX 12 a few months prior and the initiative that would produce Vulkan starting to take shape. These parallel efforts signaled a significant
A Decade of Metal: The Early Years (2014–2019) Read More »
Metal 3, introduced by Apple at WWDC 2022, brought with it a significant number of features that enable modern rendering techniques, faster resource loading, and flexible shader compilation. It also includes an all-new geometry pipeline that unlocks novel rendering techniques by allowing developers to bypass most of the traditional vertex processing steps and submit geometry
Mesh Shaders and Meshlet Culling in Metal 3 Read More »