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. …
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, …
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 …
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 …