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 …
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 …
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 …
In November 2014, I was privileged to deliver a talk to San Francisco’s Swift Language User Group, hosted by Realm. They’ve now uploaded the video, with subtitles and synchronized slide deck to their site. You can view the video here.
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.
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, …
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 »
In our inaugural post of the series, we got a glimpse of many of the essential moving parts of the Metal framework: devices, textures, command buffers, and command queues. Although that post was long, it couldn’t possibly cover all these things in detail. This post will add a little more depth to the discussion of …
Up and Running with Metal, Part 2: Drawing Triangles Read More »