Types of Light in Metal API
light, macos, metal, swift
Solution
The Metal API itself has no concept of anything as high-level as a “light”, in the same way that modern OpenGL doesn’t—the APIs for that kind of thing went the way of the dinosaur with the fixed-function pipeline. With modern low-level graphics APIs, you need to roll your own lighting; the excellent Metal By Example series has an article on doing that, though you may want to go through the earlier sections to get a clearer idea of what’s going on. Note that that article only deals with directional lights; spot lights are significantly trickier and you’ll need to do some research to find how those are usually done and then implement that approach in Metal.
As an alternative to using Metal directly, you might want to look into SceneKit, which is quite powerful and has built-in support for many types of light via the SCNLight class.
Problem
I'd like to know if there are only `Point Light` and `Ambient Light` in Metal API or I can also use `Spot Light` and `Directional Light` in my 3D environment? ``` struct Light { var color: (Float, Float, Float) var ambientIntensity: Float static func size() -> Int { return sizeof(Float) * 4 } func raw() -> [Float] { let raw = [color.0, color.1, color.2, ambientIntensity] return raw } } ``` How to implement `Spot Light` and `Directional Light` if they exist in Apple's Metal API?