readme.md

I'm learning computer graphics by watching the a l a r m i n g l y well produced recorded lectures by Cem Yuksel for University of Utah's Interactive Computer Graphics CS 5610/6610.

This repository contains my attempt to complete the projects associated with the course.

❗ WARNING: Developed and tested ONLY on Metal 3 (MacOS Ventura Beta 4, Xcode 14 Beta 4, MacBook Pro M1 Max). Outside of this setup, I have no idea whether any of this code works.

Project 1: Hello World

• Render something!

Project 2: Transformations

• Transform model vertex coordinates to to normalized device coordinates
• Toggle between Orthographic and Perspective Projection

Project 3: Shading

• Ambient, Diffuse, and Specular Shading

Project 4: Textures

• Load and render model materials

Project 5: Render Buffers

• Render to a texture, then render that texture to a plane
• Toggle between different texture sampling modes
  • Nearest
  • Bilinear
  • Trilinear
  • Anisotropic

Project 6: Environment Mapping

• Render an environment (skybox) using a cube texture
• Render model and plane with perfect, mirror-like material
• Render model's reflection onto the plane

X-Project 6: Ray Traced Reflections/Environment Mapping

Alternate implementation of Project 6 using Ray Tracing.

• Render model and plane using multi-bounce (4) ray tracing
  • Unlike original Project 6, the model reflects on itself!
• Render laser pointer to visualize ray tracing

Project 7: Shadow Mapping

• Render shadows of a model onto itself and a plane below it
• Use a Shadow Map (Depth texture)

X-Project 7: Ray Traced Shadows

Alternate implementation of Project 7 using Ray Tracing.

• Render shadows of a model onto itself and a plane below it
• Use a Ray Tracing

Project 8: Tesselation

• Normal Mapping
• Displacement Mapping with Tesselation Shaders

X-Project: Ray Tracing

• Basic Ray Tracing (Primary Ray) rendering a model's normals
• Uses an Acceleration Structure with embedded normals for each triangle primitive
• Normals (3) are encoded as 2 u32's (unorm 10 10 10 2) with Signed Octohedral encoding
  • http://johnwhite3d.blogspot.com/2017/10/signed-octahedron-normal-encoding.html
• Goals
  • Learn the basics of using the Metal Ray Tracing APIs and XCode's Acceleration Structure tooling.
  • Develop metal-app/ModelAccelerationStructure API for loading a model's geometry into a Metal Acceleration Structure
    • Used by X-Project 6 and X-Project 7

Implementation

Hold on to your butts....

I'm trying to learn new stuff on top of new stuff.

• Rust
• Apple Metal
  • metal-rs Crate for Rust/Metal bindings
    • Forked with some Metal 3 additions
  • Metal 3 techniques used
    • Bindless Argument buffers
    • Faster Resource Loading with MTLIO
      • asset-compiler crate
        • Cube Textures (ex. Project 6: Environment Mapping)
          • Build/compile time, cube face textures are compiled into a directory of lz4 compressed textures using Metal 3's MTLIO Compression Context
          • Run time, cube faces are loaded into a cube texture using Metal 3's MTLIO Command Buffer
    • Coming soon: Offline Native Shader Compilation/Loading

Common Project Architecture

TODO: Document metal-types/metal-build crates and how data structures are shared between Metal and Rust

TODO: Document how metal-build provides build.rs support for each project to precompile shaders

TODO: Document metal-app, especially RenderPipeline and Binds for simplifying and removing/reducing errors when setting up simple to complex (ex. depth/stencil, multiple sub-passes, many binds) render pipelines.

Performance

See performance.md for more in-depth documentation on workflows and tooling for assessing performance.