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If you want to generate textures which you then read at runtime, this kind of technique is very useful - for instance, imagine you want to create the normal map
by pasabagi 5y ago
If you want to generate textures which you then read at runtime, this kind of technique is very useful - for instance, imagine you want to create the normal map of a cloud, or create a height map to displace vertices with (for a procedural landscape).
- anentropic 5y agoBut using noise to generate textures isn't directly related to SDF (I think?) from other replies I think the point here is there are no "vertices", i.e. no mesh geometry
- pasabagi 5y agoWell yeah, but you can obviously use signed distance functions to create a texture (that's what a shader is doing) that can be used at runtime. Imagine you want to make the normal map for a bubbly surface, for example, but you also want the bubbles to be animated. One way of doing this would be to render the normals from a bunch of sdf spheres onto a 3d texture, which would then be used later. I don't use this a work - it's just an approach that I've had some success with at home. On my machine, complex fragment shaders are always slow - so maybe this kind of sdf-based approach works in realtime for other people.