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The part where he shows the super simple blending of the monster's 'legs' with the sphere (page 42), opened up in my mind a lot of possibilities for procedural
by westoncb 11y ago
The part where he shows the super simple blending of the monster's 'legs' with the sphere (page 42), opened up in my mind a lot of possibilities for procedural model generation I hadn't considered before. Eventually I understood why it was possible/powerful (via a certain generalization called 'FRep': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_representation). Very different from the sort of 'polygon stitching' I thought was necessary (e.g. when I tried this: https://github.com/westoncb/3D-Mushroom-Generator https://github.com/westoncb/3D-Mushroom-Generator)
The fact that you can do such cool things in real-time with raymarching (as the Shadertoy website is largely a showcase of) is pretty awesome. I have tried building raymarched games on iOS and Android—but I've only gotten to the point of setting up basic scenes and estimating it's still not quite possible to do a full game this way, yet (on mobile anyway). Maybe something very simple at 30fps on a nice device.
- kayamon 11y agoIf you want to do it in realtime, your best bet is to use Marching Cubes to tessellate the isosurface into a triangle mesh. You can either do that every frame, or cache the result and animate it via conventional means.
- westoncb 11y agoThat's an interesting idea. Thanks. Though, personally, a big part of what appeals to me about rendering with distance fields is the simplicity of it: no triangles and, most everything is in the shader so I don't have to waste time fine tuning how my buffers are pushed around for OpenGL.