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 …
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.
In this post, we will start exploring the world of image processing with the Metal shading language. We will create a framework capable of representing chains of image filters, then write a pair of image filters that will allow us to adjust the saturation and blur of an image. The end result will be an …
This post is an introduction to topics in compute (or data-parallel) programming. It is designed to be read before its companion article, Fundamentals of Image Processing. In this article, we will cover the basics of setting up the compute pipeline and executing kernel functions on large sets of data in parallel. The companion article covers …
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, …
One of the changes made to the Metal API in the iOS 8 GM was the addition of the supportsFeatureSet: method to the MTLDevice protocol. The purpose of this method is to differentiate between devices powered by the A7 and A8 processor, because these chips offer different capabilities to 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. …
Up and Running with Metal, Part 3: Lighting and Rendering in 3D Read More »
Introduction This post will cover the essential mathematics for doing 3D graphics programming. I chose to split it out into a separate post because there is quite a lot of ground to cover, and attempting to wedge all of these concepts into a tutorial post would be overwhelming. If you already have a grasp of …
The previous two posts covered many of the nitty-gritty details of Metal, but I wanted to take a step back and put Metal in context. Not only are future posts going to require more work — more math, more figures, more code, deeper examples — I feel it may be necessary to explain the motivation …
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 »