3 ms·
> Also a demonstration of how slow that technique is. Or how fast! SDFs can compute approximations of volumetric effects that on a regular raytracing engine wo
by kroltan 7y ago
> Also a demonstration of how slow that technique is.
Or how fast! SDFs can compute approximations of volumetric effects that on a regular raytracing engine would take a few seconds to render.
Additionally, games have been using (baked) 2D SDFs [1] for ages to render world-space (and recently even plain screen-space) text, it's plausible to use the same technique to generate other kinds of shapes.
It can be very useful for UI elements since you can have just a few source assets, and with some shader parameters you get fully animatable effects such as drop shadows, glow, and even normals.
[1]: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTestedMagnification.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...
- BubRoss 7y agoYou are conflating multiple things here. Marching through volumes for volumetric effects are not going to be made faster by SDFs generally because you need to march through the videos from an eye ray and march back to the light sources while doing it. 2D signed distance fields are also different, since as textures, each shader fragment is still looking at the same pixels it would have seen before and is just able to do a little extra work with the values it finds to create sharp text.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]