High-performance graphics and data-parallel programming for iOS and macOS
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. … Read moreRendering 3D Text with Core Text and libtess2
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, … Read moreRendering Physically-Based ModelIO Materials
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 … Read moreRendering Text in Metal with Signed-Distance Fields
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 … Read moreInstanced Rendering 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, … Read moreTextures and Samplers in Metal
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. … Read moreUp and Running with Metal, Part 3: Lighting and Rendering in 3D
In the previous article, we wrote enough Metal code to get the spinning silhouette of a teapot on the screen, but that still leaves a lot to be desired as far as a “modern” app is concerned. In this article, we’ll further flesh out the app and introduce lighting, materials, texturing, and managing multiple objects … Read moreWriting a Modern Metal App from Scratch: Part 2
Getting Started This article is a quick introduction to how to use the Metal, MetalKit, and Model I/O frameworks in Swift. If you know your way around UIKit or Cocoa development, you should be able to follow along for the most part. Some things like shaders and matrices will be foreign to you, but you … Read moreWriting a Modern Metal App from Scratch: Part 1
What is the Metal Performance Shaders Framework? Announced at WWDC 2015, the Metal Performance Shaders (MPS) framework is a collection of high-performance image filters for iOS 9. Each filter in the library is an efficient black-box implementation of a common image processing task: blur, edge detection, convolution, etc. One useful trait of Apple’s black-box approach … Read moreMetal Performance Shaders in Swift
MetalKit is a forthcoming framework on iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan that greatly eases certain tasks such as presenting Metal content in a UIView or NSView, texture loading, and working with model data. This post is an overview of the features offered by MetalKit. Many of our articles so far have focused on … Read moreFirst Look at MetalKit