Well 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

Well 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.