A guide covering Blender including the applications, libraries and tools that will make you a better and more efficient Designer/Developer with Blender.
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Blender is a professional, free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games. Independent Blender LTS support and services for enterprises are available now via Canonical(makers of the Ubuntu Advanced platform).
Blender Foundation Certification Training
Blender YouTube Tutorials and Demos
Blender Market(The indie market for Blender creators)
Blender comes packed with import/export support for many different programs.
Including:
- Image(JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, TARGA, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, Radiance HDR, SGI Iris, TIFF)
- Video(AVI, MPEG and Quicktime (on MacOS)).
- 3D(Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), COLLADA (DAE), Filmbox (FBX), Autodesk (DXF), Wavefront (OBJ), DirectX (x), Lightwave (LWO), Motion Capture (BVH), SVG, Stanford PLY, STL, VRML, VRML97, X3D).
Eevee is Blender’s realtime render engine built using OpenGL focused on speed and interactivity while achieving the goal of rendering PBR materials. Eevee can be used interactively in the 3D Viewport but also produce high quality final renders. Eevee materials are created using the same shader nodes as Cycles, making it easy to render existing scenes. For Cycles users, this makes Eevee work great for previewing materials in realtime.
Eevee final render – “Temple”. Source: Dominik Graf
Cycles is Blender’s ray-trace based production render engine.
Blender's Cycles Render Engine. Source: Blender
Blender VFX(Visual Effects). Source: Blender
FreeStyle is an edge- and line-based non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine. It relies on mesh data and z-depth information to draw lines on selected edge types. Various line styles can be added to produce artistic (“hand drawn”, “painted”, etc.) or technical (hard line) looks.
Modifiers are automatic operations that affect an object in a non-destructive way. With modifiers, you can perform many effects automatically that would otherwise be too tedious to update manually (such as subdivision surfaces) and without affecting the base geometry of your object.
UV Unwrapping is a tool that let's you easily unwrap your mesh right inside Blender, and use image textures or paint your own directly onto the model.
UV Sculpt is a “mode” in Blender that allows you to grab, pinch and smooth UVs, just like Sculpt Mode.
Dedicated Workspace is a feature of sculpting organic subjects using the built-in sculpting feature set of Blender.
Brushes is a feature in Blender that comes with built-in brushes such as Crease, Clay Strips, Pinch, Grab, Smooth, Mask and many more.
Dynamic topology( dyntopo) is a dynamic tessellation sculpting method, which adds and removes details on the fly, whereas regular sculpting only affects the shape of a mesh.
Masking is a feature used while sculpting, areas might be hidden behind parts of the mesh or they might be too close to other parts. To work through these, it is useful to isolate parts of a mesh to sculpt on. This can be done by either completely hiding parts of the mesh or by masking areas that can not be sculpted on.
Grease Pencil is a particular type of Blender object that allow you to draw in the 3D space. It can be use to make traditional 2D animation, cut-out animation, motion graphics or use it as storyboard tool among other things.
Constraints are a way to control an object’s properties (e.g. its location, rotation, scale), using either plain static values (like the “limit” ones), or another object, called “target” (like e.g. the “copy” ones).
Drivers are a way to control values of properties by means of a function, mathematical expression or small script.
Shape keys are used to deform objects into new shapes for animation. In other terminology, shape keys may be called “morph targets” or “blend shapes”. The most popular use cases for shape keys are in character facial animation and in tweaking and refining a skeletal rig. They are particularly useful for modeling organic soft parts and muscles where there is a need for more control over the resulting shape than what can be achieved with combination of rotation and scale.
Motion Paths is a tool allows you to visualize the motion of points as paths over a series of frames. These points can be object origins and bone joints.
Simulations is a tool that allows you to create amazing Simulations such as a crumbling building, rain, fire, smoke, fluid, cloth or full on destruction.
Blender Video Editor is a video editor that comes with a built-in video sequence editor allows you to perform basic actions like video cuts and splicing, as well as more complex tasks like video masking or color grading.
Blender Compositing is a feature that comes with an impressive library of nodes for creating camera fx, color grading, vignettes and much more Render-layer support. Along with the ability to render to multiLayer OpenEXR files.
Blender Motion Tracking is a feature that provides production ready camera and object tracking, allowing you to import raw footage, track it, mask areas and reconstruct the camera movements live in your 3d scene.
fSpy is an open source still image camera matching tool developed by Stuffmatic. Also check-out the fSpy importer for Blender.
Using the fSpy in Blender for Camera Matching a 3D model. Source:fSpy
Maya® is a 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software that can create realistic effects from explosions to cloth simulation.
Maya LT™ is a game design software for indie game makers that can create and animate realistic-looking characters, props, and environments using the sophisticated 3D modeling and animation tools.
Autodesk® Maya. Source:Autodesk
3DS Max® is a 3D modeling and rendering software for design visualization, games, and animation.
Autodesk® 3DS Max. Source:Autodesk
Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing(Global illumination) renderer that helps you work more efficiently.
ReCap™ is a Pro 3D scanning software to transform the physical world into a digital asset. With reality capture data you can better understand and verify existing and as-built conditions to gain insights and make better decisions.
Flame® is a 3D VFX and finishing software provides powerful tools for 3D compositing, visual effects, and editorial finishing. An integrated, creative environment means faster compositing, advanced graphics, color correction, and more.
Mudbox® is a 3D digital painting and sculpting software that let's you sculpt and paint highly detailed 3D geometry and textures.
Autodesk® Mudbox. Source:Autodesk
Character Generator® is a powerful 3D design and animation tools, Character Generator offers artists a web-based laboratory to create fully rigged 3D characters for animation packages and game engines.
Smoke® is a video effects software helps production studios increase productivity by combining editing workflows with node-based compositing tools in a timeline-centered editing environment.
ShotGrid formerly Shotgun Software, is software for creative project management software and review tools for film, TV, and games that streamlines workflows for creative studios.
Open Graphics Library(OpenGL) is an API used acrossed mulitple programming languages and platforms for hardware-accelerated rendering of 2D/3D vector graphics currently developed by the Khronos Group.
Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other hardware accelerators found in supercomputers, cloud servers, personal computers, mobile devices and embedded platforms.
OpenGL Shading Language(GLSL) is a High Level Shading Language based on the C-style language, so it covers most of the features a user would expect with such a language. Such as control structures (for-loops, if-else statements, etc) exist in GLSL, including the switch statement.
High Level Shading Language(HLSL) is the High Level Shading Language for DirectX. Using HLSL, the user can create C-like programmable shaders for the Direct3D pipeline. HLSL was first created with DirectX 9 to set up the programmable 3D pipeline.
DirectX 12 Ultimate is an API(for high performance 2D & 3D graphics) from Microsoft. DirectX 12 Ultimate brings support for ray tracing, mesh shaders, variable rate shading, and sampler feedback. Available in Windows 2004 version(May 2020 Update).
Vulkan is a modern cross-platform graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. Vulkan is currently in development by the Khronos consortium.
Metal is a low-level GPU programming framework used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics on Apple platforms such as iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
MoltenVK is an implementation of Vulkan running on iOS and macOS using Apple's Metal graphics framework.
MoltenGL is an implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that runs on Apple's Metal graphics framework.
Mesa 3D Graphics Library is a project began as an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification. A system for rendering interactive 3D graphics. Mesa ties into several other open-source projects: the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, X.org, and Wayland to provide OpenGL support on Linux, FreeBSD, and other operating systems.
OpenGL ES is the mobile subset of OpenGL. It's supported on all major mobile platforms, and is also the base for WebGL.
OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs and other processors or hardware accelerators.
EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system.
VDPAU is the Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX. It provides an interface to video decode acceleration and presentation hardware present in modern GPUs.
VA API is an open-source library and API specification, which provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing.
XvMC is an extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System. The XvMC API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU hardware.
LibGDX is a cross-platform Java game development framework based on OpenGL (ES) that works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, your WebGL enabled browser and iOS.
VR Scene Inspection — Blender Manual
MARUI is a plugin for Autodesk Maya that allows you to create 3D design in VR/AR for Blender.
openXR is a free, open standard that provides high-performance access to Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) collectively known as XR—platforms and devices.
Monado is the first OpenXR™ runtime for GNU/Linux. Monado aims to jump-start development of an open source XR ecosystem and provide the fundamental building blocks for device vendors to target the GNU/Linux platform.
Vuforia is a comprehensive, scalable enterprise AR platform. Our wide-ranging solution suite ensures that we can provide the right AR technology to every customer based on their business needs.
Vuforia Studio is a tool that allows anyone to create beautiful 3D augmented reality (AR) experiences in a matter of minutes with no coding required.
OpenVX™ is an open-source, royalty-free standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications. OpenVX enables performance and power-optimized computer vision processing, especially important in embedded and real-time use cases such as face, body and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more.
GPUImage framework is a BSD-licensed iOS library that lets you apply GPU-accelerated filters and other effects to images, live camera video, and movies. In comparison to Core Image (part of iOS 5.0), GPUImage allows you to write your own custom filters, supports deployment to iOS 4.0, and has a simpler interface. However, it currently lacks some of the more advanced features of Core Image, such as facial detection.
GPUImage3 is the third generation of the GPUImage framework, an open source project for performing GPU-accelerated image and video processing on Mac and iOS. The original GPUImage framework was written in Objective-C and targeted Mac and iOS, the second iteration rewritten in Swift using OpenGL to target Mac, iOS, and Linux, and now this third generation is redesigned to use Metal in place of OpenGL.
ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.
RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.
ARCore is a software development kit developed by Google that allows for augmented reality applications in the real world. These tools include environmental understanding, which allows devices to detect horizontal and vertical surfaces and planes. It also includes motion tracking, which lets phones understand and track their positions relative to the world. Also ARCore’s Light Estimation API lets your digital objects appear realistically as if they’re actually part of the physical world.
Microsoft HoloLens Headset. Source: Microsoft
PlayStation VR Headset. Source: PlayStation
SteamVR is the ultimate tool for experiencing VR content on the hardware of your choice. SteamVR supports the Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and others.
SteamVR Home
OpenVR is an API and runtime that allows access to VR hardware(Steam Index, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift) from multiple vendors without requiring that applications have specific knowledge of the hardware they are targeting.
OpenVR Benchmark on Steam is the first benchmark tool for reproducibly testing your real VR performance, rendering inside of your VR headset.
OpenHMD is open source API and drivers that supports a wide range of HMD(head-mounted display) devices such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Sony PSVR, and others.
Libsurvive is a set of tools and libraries that enable 6 dof tracking on lighthouse and vive based systems that is completely open source and can run on any device. It currently supports both SteamVR 1.0 and SteamVR 2.0 generation of devices and should support any tracked object commercially available.
Simula is a VR window manager for Linux that runs on top of Godot. It takes less than 1 minute to install. Simula is officially compatible with SteamVR headsets equipped with Linux drivers (e.g. HTC Vive, HTC Vive Pro, & Valve Index). We have also added experimental support to OpenXR headsets that have Monado drivers (e.g. North Star, OSVR HDK, and PSVR). Some people have gotten the Oculus Rift S to run Simula via OpenHMD (see here).
Vulkan® is a modern cross-platform graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. Vulkan is currently in development by the Khronos consortium.
HLSL to SPIR-V Feature Mapping Manual
Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator Tutorial
Vulkan SDK is a set of tools that enables Vulkan developers to develop Vulkan applications.
SPIR-V is a set of tools that enables high-level language front-ends to emit programs in a standardized intermediate form to be ingested by Vulkan, OpenGL or OpenCL drivers. It eliminates the need for high-level language front-end compilers in device drivers, significantly reducing driver complexity, enables a broad range of language and framework front-ends to run on diverse hardware architectures and encourages a vibrant ecosystem of open source analysis, porting, debug and optimization tools.
SPIRV-Reflect is a lightweight library that provides a C/C++ reflection API for SPIR-V shader bytecode in Vulkan applications.
Vulkan® Tools is a project that provides Khronos official Vulkan Tools and Utilities for Windows, Linux, Android, and macOS.
Vulkan-Hpp is a API that provides a header only C++ bindings for the Vulkan C API to improve the developers Vulkan experience without introducing CPU runtime cost. It adds features like type safety for enums and bitfields, STL container support, exceptions and simple enumerations.
Vulkan® Memory Allocator (VMA) is a library that provides a simple and easy to integrate API to help you allocate memory for Vulkan® buffer and image storage.
AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan® is an open-source Vulkan driver for AMD Radeon™ graphics adapters on Linux®.
NVIDIA® Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition is an application development environment for heterogeneous platforms which brings GPU computing into Microsoft Visual Studio. NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE allows you to build and debug integrated GPU kernels and native CPU code as well as inspect the state of the GPU and memory.
Radeon™ GPU Profiler is a performance tool that can be used by developers to optimize DirectX®12, Vulkan® and OpenCL™ applications for AMD RDNA™ and GCN hardware.
Radeon™ GPU Analyzer is a compiler and code analysis tool for Vulkan®, DirectX®, OpenGL® and OpenCL™.
Radeon™ Memory Visualizer (RMV) is a tool provided by AMD for use by game engine developers. It allows engineers to examine, diagnose, and understand the GPU memory management within their projects.
DXVK is a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine.
MoltenVK is an implementation of Vulkan running on iOS and macOS using Apple's Metal graphics framework.
RenderDoc is a stand-alone graphics debugger that allows quick and easy single-frame capture and detailed introspection of any application using Vulkan, D3D11, OpenGL & OpenGL ES or D3D12 across Windows, Linux, Android, Stadia, or Nintendo Switch™.
PerfDoc is a cross-platform Vulkan layer which checks Vulkan applications for best practices on Arm Mali devices.
GLFW is an Open Source, multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan application development. It provides a simple, platform-independent API for creating windows, contexts and surfaces, reading input, handling events, etc. GLFW natively supports Windows, macOS and Linux and other Unix-like systems. On Linux both X11 and Wayland are supported.
VulkanSharp is a project provides a .NET binding for the Vulkan API.
Vortice.Vulkan is a .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET5 low-level bindings for Vulkan API.
VKD3D-Proton is a fork of VKD3D, which aims to implement the full Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan.
ImGui is a bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++. It outputs optimized vertex buffers that you can render anytime in your 3D-pipeline enabled application. It is fast, portable, renderer agnostic and self-contained (no external dependencies).
Ash is a very lightweight wrapper around Vulkan.
gfx-rs is a low-level, cross-platform graphics and compute abstraction library in Rust.
Vulkan.jl is a lightweight wrapper around the Vulkan graphics and compute library. It exposes abstractions over the underlying C interface, primarily geared towards developers looking for a more natural way to work with Vulkan with minimal overhead.
Open Graphics Library(OpenGL)™ is an API used acrossed mulitple programming languages and platforms for hardware-accelerated rendering of 2D/3D vector graphics currently developed by the Khronos Group.
OpenGL ES™ is the mobile subset of OpenGL for Embedded Systems(ES). It's supported on all major mobile platforms, and is also the base for WebGL.
WebGL™ is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES, exposed to JavaScript via the HTML5 Canvas element.
Khronos Technology Courses and Training
Top OpenGL Courses Online | Coursera
Top OpenGL Courses Online | Udemy
OpenGL Online Training Courses | LinkedIn Learning
Getting Started with OpenGL ES
BuGLe is a debugger for Linux and other UNIX-like OSes. BuGLe combines a graphical OpenGL debugger with a selection of filters on the OpenGL command stream. The debugger allows viewing of state, textures, framebuffers and shaders, while the filters allow for logging, error checking, video capture and more.
gDEBugger is a full-featured and free debugger and profiler representing the state-of-the-art in OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugging and profiling on Windows and Linux.
KTX is a lightweight file format for delivering textures to OpenGL family APIs.
RenderDoc is a stand-alone graphics debugger that allows quick and easy single-frame capture and detailed introspection of any application using Vulkan, D3D11, OpenGL & OpenGL ES or D3D12 across Windows, Linux, Android, Stadia, or Nintendo Switch™.
NVIDIA® Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition is an application development environment for heterogeneous platforms which brings GPU computing into Microsoft Visual Studio. NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE allows you to build and debug integrated GPU kernels and native CPU code as well as inspect the state of the GPU and memory.
Radeon™ GPU Profiler is a performance tool that can be used by developers to optimize DirectX®12, Vulkan® and OpenCL™ applications for AMD RDNA™ and GCN hardware.
Radeon™ GPU Analyzer is a compiler and code analysis tool for Vulkan®, DirectX®, OpenGL® and OpenCL™.
AMD Radeon ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images on virtually any GPU, any CPU, and any OS in over a dozen leading digital content creation and CAD applications.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a powerful, multi-GPU, real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines based on Pixar's Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX.
MoltenGL is an implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that runs on Apple's Metal graphics framework.
EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system.
Equalizer is an open source programming interface and resource management system for scalable OpenGL applications. An Equalizer application can be deployed on any visualization system, from a singlepipe workstation to large scale graphics clusters.
GLee is a free cross-platform extension loading library that takes the burden off your application. GLee makes it easy to check for OpenGL extension and core version availability, automatically setting up the entry points with no effort on your part.
GLEW is an open-source cross-platform extension loading library with thread-safe support for multiple rendering contexts and automatic code generation capability. GLEW provides easy-to-use and efficient methods for checking OpenGL extensions and core functionality.
GLUS is an open-source C library, which provides a hardware and operating system abstraction plus many functions usually needed for graphics programming using OpenGL, OpenGL ES or OpenVG.
OpenGL Mathematics (GLM) is a C++ mathematics library for 3D software based on the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) specification.
libktx is a library of functions(part of the KTX tool set) for writing KTX format files and instantiating GL textures from them.
OpenSceneGraph is a high-level 3D graphics toolkit exposing OpenGL's capabilities while providing many capabilities of its own. OpenSceneGraph boasts a large user community and has been employed for visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization, and modeling.
Mesa 3D Graphics Library is a project that began as an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification. A system for rendering interactive 3D graphics. Mesa ties into several other open-source projects: the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, X.org, and Wayland to provide OpenGL support on Linux, FreeBSD, and other operating systems.
Microsoft DirectX® is a low-level API that handles tasks related to multimedia for game programming and video on Microsoft platforms(Windows & Xbox).
Getting Started with DirectX 12 Ultimate
Getting Started with the DirectX 12 Agility SDK
DirectX 12 and Graphics Education | YouTube
DirectX 12 Technology | NVIDIA
AMD DirectX® 12 (DX12) Technology | AMD
Top Microsoft DirectX Courses Online | Udemy
DirectX - Learn Microsoft DirectX from Scratch Course | Udemy
DirectX 11 Programming Course | Udemy
Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft; which is a feature-rich application that can be used for many aspects of software development. Visual Studio makes it easy to edit, debug, build, and publish your app. By using Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Windows Store.
Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications.
DirectX-Graphics-Samples is a project that contains the DirectX 12 Graphics samples that demonstrate how to build graphics intensive applications for Windows 10.
PIX on Windows is a performance tuning and debugging tool for DirectX 12 games on Windows.
DirectStorage API is an API in the DirectX family originally designed for the Velocity Architecture to Windows. The DirectX API is architected in a way that takes all this into account and maximizes performance throughout the entire pipeline from NVMe drive all the way to the GPU. It does this in several ways: by reducing per-request NVMe overhead, enabling batched many-at-a-time parallel IO requests which can be efficiently fed to the GPU, and giving games finer grain control over when they get notified of IO request completion instead of having to react to every tiny IO completion. The DirectStorage API will be available on Windows 11 PCs with NVMe SSDs, but will also be support in Windows 10 version 1909 and newer.
NVIDIA® Nsight™ Visual Studio Edition is an application development environment for heterogeneous platforms which brings GPU computing into Microsoft Visual Studio. NVIDIA Nsight™ VSE allows you to build and debug integrated GPU kernels and native CPU code as well as inspect the state of the GPU and memory.
NVRHI (NVIDIA Rendering Hardware Interface) is a library that implements a common abstraction layer over multiple graphics APIs (GAPIs): Direct3D 11, Direct3D 12, and Vulkan 1.2. It works on Windows (x64 only) and Linux (x64 and ARM64).
RTXMU - RTX Memory Utility SDK is an SDK tool that batchs up all of the acceleration structure build inputs and pass them to RTXMU which in turn will perform all the suballocation memory requests and build details including compaction. Then post build info is abstracted away by the SDK in order to do compaction under the hood. RTXMU returns acceleration structure handle ids that are used to reference the underlying memory buffers. These handle ids are passed into RTXMU to create compaction copy workloads, deallocate unused build resources or remove all memory associated with an acceleration structure.
Radeon™ GPU Profiler is a performance tool that can be used by developers to optimize DirectX®12, Vulkan® and OpenCL™ applications for AMD RDNA™ and GCN hardware.
Radeon™ GPU Analyzer is a compiler and code analysis tool for Vulkan®, DirectX®, OpenGL® and OpenCL™.
Radeon™ Memory Visualizer (RMV) is a tool provided by AMD for use by game engine developers. It allows engineers to examine, diagnose, and understand the GPU memory management within their projects.
FNA is an XNA4 reimplementation that focuses solely on developing a fully accurate XNA4 runtime for the desktop.
FAudio is an XAudio reimplementation that focuses solely on developing fully accurate DirectX Audio runtime libraries for the FNA project, including XAudio2, X3DAudio, XAPO, and XACT3.
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve's award winning catalog.
DXVK is a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine.
VKD3D-Proton is a fork of VKD3D, which aims to implement the full Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan.
RenderDoc is a stand-alone graphics debugger that allows quick and easy single-frame capture and detailed introspection of any application using Vulkan, D3D11, OpenGL & OpenGL ES or D3D12 across Windows, Linux, Android, Stadia, or Nintendo Switch™.
Metal is a low-level API that provides a platform-optimized, low-overhead API for developing the latest 3D pro applications and amazing games using a rich shading language with tighter integration between graphics and compute programs. To help you do more while managing ever more complex shader code, Metal adds an unparalleled suite of advanced GPU debugging tools to help you realize the full potential of your graphics code.
Blender 3.1 Adds Native Metal Support in Cycles
Metal Shading Language Specification
Using Metal Feature Set Tables
Optimizing Performance with the GPU Counters Instrument
Reducing the Memory Footprint of Metal Apps
Metal Developer Tools for Windows
Apple Foundation Framework is a framework provides a base layer of functionality for apps and frameworks, including data storage and persistence, text processing, date and time calculations, sorting and filtering, and networking. The classes, protocols, and data types defined by Foundation are used throughout the macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS SDKs.
Apple Core Animation Framework is a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure that provides high frame rates and smooth animations without burdening the CPU and slowing down your app.
Apple Core Graphics Frameworkis a framework based on the Quartz advanced drawing engine. It provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity.
Paravirtualized Graphics Framework is a framework that implements hardware-accelerated graphics for macOS running in a virtual machine, hereafter known as the guest. The macOS operating system provides a graphics driver that runs inside the guest, communicating with the framework in the host operating system to take advantage of Metal-accelerated graphics.
Xcode includes everything developers need to create great applications for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Xcode provides developers a unified workflow for user interface design, coding, testing, and debugging. Xcode 12 is built as an Universal app that runs 100% natively on Intel-based CPUs and Apple Silicon. It includes a unified macOS SDK that features all the frameworks, compilers, debuggers, and other tools you need to build apps that run natively on Apple Silicon and the Intel x86_64 CPU.
SwiftUI is a user interface toolkit that provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The SwiftUI framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your application.
UIKit is a framework provides the required infrastructure for your iOS or tvOS apps. It provides the window and view architecture for implementing your interface, the event handling infrastructure for delivering Multi-Touch and other types of input to your app, and the main run loop needed to manage interactions among the user, the system, and your app.
AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit that contains all the objects you need to implement the user interface for a macOS app such as windows, panels, buttons, menus, scrollers, and text fields, and it handles all the details for you as it efficiently draws on the screen, communicates with hardware devices and screen buffers, clears areas of the screen before drawing, and clips views.
ARKit is a set set of software development tools to enable developers to build augmented-reality apps for iOS developed by Apple. The latest version ARKit 3.5 takes advantage of the new LiDAR Scanner and depth sensing system on iPad Pro(2020) to support a new generation of AR apps that use Scene Geometry for enhanced scene understanding and object occlusion.
RealityKit is a framework to implement high-performance 3D simulation and rendering with information provided by the ARKit framework to seamlessly integrate virtual objects into the real world.
SceneKit is a high-level 3D graphics framework that helps you create 3D animated scenes and effects in your iOS apps.
Instruments is a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool that’s part of the Xcode tool set. It’s designed to help you profile your iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS apps, processes, and devices in order to better understand and optimize their behavior and performance.
Cocoapods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C used in Xcode projects by specifying the dependencies for your project in a simple text file. CocoaPods then recursively resolves dependencies between libraries, fetches source code for all dependencies, and creates and maintains an Xcode workspace to build your project.
AppCode is constantly monitoring the quality of your code. It warns you of errors and smells and suggests quick-fixes to resolve them automatically. AppCode provides lots of code inspections for Objective-C, Swift, C/C++, and a number of code inspections for other supported languages.
MoltenVK is an implementation of Vulkan running on iOS and macOS using Apple's Metal graphics framework.
- If would you like to contribute to this guide simply make a Pull Request.
Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Public License.