Satin Fundamentals

Satin follows the common paradigm of creative coding toolkits which you may be familiar with:

• setup() - setup your scene, load assets, etc
• update() - prior to every frame draw, update is called giving you an opportunity to tick animations, etc.

• draw(renderPassDescriptor: MTLRenderPassDescriptor, commandBuffer: MTLCommandBuffer) allows you to submit rendering commands to the GPU.

• MetalViewRenderer is the class which provides the rendering infrastructure in Satin.

Within your own MetalViewRenderer subclass - you will be working with the core base classes of Satin:

Class	Description	Subclasses
Context	Provides control over the GPU, visual fidelity	N/A
Object	Provides the basis of the scene graph, allowing for placement of and nesting of other objects to compose a scene.	Camera Mesh Light IBLScene
Camera	Provides camera controls for rendering the scene	PerspectiveCamera and OrthographicCamera
Mesh	An Object subclass that renders Geometry with Materials	InstancedMesh, TessellationMesh TextMesh
Geometry	Provides drawing of primitives (triangles, lines, points etc) via buffers of vertices and indices	See Satin/Geometry/*
Material	Provides color, shading, texturing of Meshes	See Satin/Materials/*
Shader	Provides low level control and customization of Materials and the rendering, including live coding of shaders.	See Satin/Shaders/*
Renderer	Manages low GPU resources, to render a Scene Object with one or many Camera	N/A

To display your rendered scene, Satin provides:

• SatinMetalView for SwiftUI
• SatinImmersiveSpace for visionOS
• MetalViewController along with MetalView for AppKit
• MetalViewRendererDelegate protocol for custom drawing

These views all set up a the drawing loop, MTLDevices associated with the view, command queues, antialiasing, pixel formats, etc.