Metal by Tutorials

This book will introduce you to graphics programming in Metal — Apple’s framework for programming on the GPU. Build a complete game engine in Metal! By Caroline Begbie & Marius Horga.

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Who is this for?

This book is for intermediate Swift developers interested in learning 3D graphics or gaining a deeper understanding of how game engines work.

Covered concepts

The Rendering Pipeline
3D Models
Coordinate Spaces
Lighting
Textures & Materials
Character Animation
Tessellation
Environment
Instancing & Procedural Generation
Multipass & Deferred Rendering
Performance Optimization
Particle Systems
Raytracing
Advanced Lighting & Shadows
Integration with SpriteKit & SceneKit

Build your own low-level game engine in Metal!

Metal is a unified application programming interface (API) for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. It’s unified because it applies to both 3D graphics and data-parallel computation paradigms. Metal is a low-level API because it provides programmers near-direct access to the GPU....

Before You Begin

This section tells you a few things you need to know before you get started, such as what you’ll need for hardware and software, where to find the project files for this book and more.

What You Need

Book Source Code & Forums

iii

Dedications

About the Team

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Section I: Beginning Metal

It takes a wealth of knowledge to render a simple triangle on the screen or animate game characters. This section will guide you through the necessary basics of vertex wrangling, lighting, textures and creating a game scene. If you’re worried about the math, don’t be! Although computer graphics is highly math-intensive, each chapter explains everything you need, and you’ll get experience creating and rendering models.

Hello, Metal!

In this chapter, you'll get an introduction to Metal as you render your first primitive object. You'll also learn why you would use Metal over other graphics frameworks.

3D Models

In this chapter, you'll dive into the world of 3D models, learning how to work with them in Blender, and how to render them on the screen with Metal.

The Rendering Pipeline

In this chapter, you’ll go further with Metal by creating a macOS app from scratch, where you’ll learn how the rendering pipeline works to create the beautiful graphics you see onscreen.

The Vertex Function

In this chapter, you'll get a look at the first of two programmable stages in Metal, the vertex stage and the vertex function.

3D Transformations

In this chapter, you'll become a matrix master as you learn what matrices can do for you and how to manipulate them painlessly.

Coordinate Spaces

In this chapter, you'll get an introduction to some of the mathematical concepts used in Metal, and how to find your way around the scene using Metal's coordinate system.

The Fragment Function

In this chapter, you'll learn about the fragment function, which is responsible for returning a color for each fragment that successfully passes through the rasterizer.

Textures

In this chapter, you'll learn about UV coordinates, texturing a model, samplers, mipmaps and the asset catalog.

Navigating a 3D Scene

In this chapter, you'll learn how to manage scenes as you create three different cameras and add the ability to capture user input.

Lighting Fundamentals

In this chapter, you'll learn how to add professional lighting to your scenes.

Section II: Intermediate Metal

With the basics under your belt, you can move on to multi-pass rendering. You’ll add shadows and learn several new rendering techniques. Programming the GPU using compute shaders can be intimidating, so you’ll create particle systems to learn how fast multi-threaded solutions can be.

Maps & Materials

In this chapter, you'll find out how to use material groups to describe a surface, and how to design textures for micro detail.

Render Passes

In this chapter, you'll work with renderer passes as you add more complexity to your scene.

Shadows

In this chapter, you'll learn about shadows and how you can use them to bring a sense of depth to your scenes.

Deferred Rendering

In this chapter, you'll learn about deferred rendering, an approach that takes the quadratic runtime down to linear runtime when processing models.

Tile-Based Deferred Rendering

In this chapter, you'll learn how to handle scenes that contain many lights by using a technique known as tile-based deferred rendering.

GPU Compute Programming

In this chapter, you'll play with GPU programming as you explore how to use the GPU in ways other than vertex rendering.

Particle Systems

In this chapter, you'll learn about generators, emitters, particle life, the compute kernel and more.

Particle Behavior

In this chapter, you'll work with particles as you build and control a swarm that mimics natural behaviors.

Section III: Advanced Metal

In this section, you’ll learn many advanced features of Metal and explore realistic rendering techniques. You’ll animate characters, and also manage rendering your scenes on the GPU.

Tessellation & Terrains

In this chapter, you’ll learn about tessellations as you create a detailed terrain using a small number of points.

Fragment Post-Processing

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use post-processing effects to take your scenes to the next level.

Imaged-Based Lighting

In this chapter, you’ll learn about skyboxes, cube maps, image-based lighting and more as you add some surrounding features to your virtual environment.

Reflection & Refraction

In this chapter, you’ll work with reflection and refraction to add a sense of realism to your scenes.

Animation

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to bring your scenes to life as you get started with animation. You'll do so by bouncing a beachball around your scene.

Character Animation

In this chapter, you’ll continue your journey through animation by rendering a friendly skeleton.

Managing Resources

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to properly manage your resources using argument buffers and heaps.

GPU-Driven Rendering

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to move the bulk of the rendering work to the GPU.

Section IV: Ray Tracing

In this section, you’ll trace rays to render objects with more realism than the rasterization techniques you’ve used up to now. As a bonus, you’ll also do some post-processing with Metal Performance Shaders. To wrap up, you’ll consider how best to profile and optimize your game.

Rendering With Rays

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to do detailed ray tracing, ray casting, path tracing and ray marching to render your graphics.

Advanced Shadows

In this chapter, you’ll learn about hard and soft shadows, ambient occlusion, screen space rendering and more.

Advanced Lighting

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the rendering equation, reflection and refraction, the Fresnel effect, lens flare, subsurface scattering and more lighting details.

Metal Performance Shaders

In this chapter, you’ll dive a bit deeper into the world of the Metal Performance Shaders (MPS) framework. The MPS kernels make use of data-parallel primitives that are written in such a way that they can take advantage of each GPU family’s characteristics.

Performance Optimization

In this chapter, you’ll learn more ways to optimize the performance of your game. You’ll understand how to categorize GPUs, how to manage memory, how to synchronize resources between the CPU and GPU, how to move your game on multiple threads and what are the best practices for a smooth rendering.

Best Practices

In this chapter, you’ll review the best practices to follow when creating your Metal apps — from choosing the right resolution to compressing textures, no best practice stone is unturned in this chapter.

Conclusion