Doing high-performance 3D rendering on the Web has always been a tricky proposition. WebGL, in its quest for programmer familiarity and cross-platform ubiquity, adopted the API of OpenGL ES. As such it has never been capable of exploiting the full power of the underlying GPU, even as desktop APIs like DirectX 12, Metal, and Vulkan …
With WWDC 2019 over, it’s a good time to reflect on everything that was announced and start seeing how we can put it into practice. The purpose of this article is to round up the changes to the Metal framework and tools and provide pointers to where you can learn more. This was a banner …
The purpose of this article is to describe and explore a foundational concept in Metal: vertex descriptors. Vertex descriptors are the glue between your application code (written in Objective-C or Swift) and your shader functions (written in the Metal Shading Language). They describe the shape of data consumed by your shaders. When I was writing …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Introduction One of the topics we’ve handily avoided so far in our exploration of Metal is rendering of materials that are not opaque. In this post, we’ll explore a couple of related techniques for achieving transparency and translucency: alpha testing and alpha blending. The sample scene for this post is a desert containing many palm …
In this article we will learn about mipmapping, an important technique for rendering textured objects at a distance. We will find out why mipmapping is important, how it complements regular texture filtering, and how to use the blit command encoder to generate mipmaps efficiently on the GPU.
In this post, we’ll talk about some of the more advanced features of texturing in Metal. We’ll apply a cube map to a skybox to simulate a detailed environment surrounding the scene. We’ll also introduce a technique called cubic environment mapping to simulate reflection and refraction, to further enhance the realism of our virtual world.