iOS & Swift

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.

Read for Free with the Personal Plan* * Includes this and all other books in our online library See all benefits
Buy Individually $59.99* *Includes access to all of our online reading features.
Leave a rating/review
Download materials
Buy paperback—Amazon Comments
Save for later
Share

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....

more

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.

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.

1
Toggle description
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.
2
Toggle description
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.
3
Toggle description
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.
4
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll get a look at the first of two programmable stages in Metal, the vertex stage and the vertex function.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll become a matrix master as you learn what matrices can do for you and how to manipulate them painlessly.
Toggle description
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.
Toggle description
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.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll learn about UV coordinates, texturing a model, samplers, mipmaps and the asset catalog.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll learn how to manage scenes as you create three different cameras and add the ability to capture user input.
Toggle description
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.

Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll find out how to use material groups to describe a surface, and how to design textures for micro detail.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll work with renderer passes as you add more complexity to your scene.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll learn about shadows and how you can use them to bring a sense of depth to your scenes.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll learn about deferred rendering, an approach that takes the quadratic runtime down to linear runtime when processing models.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll learn how to handle scenes that contain many lights by using a technique known as tile-based deferred rendering.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll play with GPU programming as you explore how to use the GPU in ways other than vertex rendering.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you'll learn about generators, emitters, particle life, the compute kernel and more.
Toggle description
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.

Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll learn about tessellations as you create a detailed terrain using a small number of points.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use post-processing effects to take your scenes to the next level.
Toggle description
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.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll work with reflection and refraction to add a sense of realism to your scenes.
Toggle description
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.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll continue your journey through animation by rendering a friendly skeleton.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to properly manage your resources using argument buffers and heaps.
Toggle description
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.

Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to do detailed ray tracing, ray casting, path tracing and ray marching to render your graphics.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll learn about hard and soft shadows, ambient occlusion, screen space rendering and more.
Toggle description
In this chapter, you’ll learn about the rendering equation, reflection and refraction, the Fresnel effect, lens flare, subsurface scattering and more lighting details.
Toggle description
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.
Toggle description
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.
Toggle description
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.