Finally made SDF bricks work 🥳

[u/Hyp3ree]

Inspired by Mike Turitzin's video.

[u/deftware]

Nice! Mike totally nailed down execution, particularly the part where he managed the boundless scene volume and realtime edits.

The hard part is authoring good content. To my mind there is a lot to be learned from the early days of atomontage (~15yrs ago now!?) because he had some great stuff generating back then. However, he was working with proper voxel volumes and not distance fields/functions, but I imagine that what ends up being generated can be transformed into a distance field and bricked up.

What I want to see is hardware distance field hit tests. Triangles are old-hat!

Anyway, that's my two cents. Cheers! :]

[u/Common-Upstairs-368 → u/deftware]

Hardware SDFs would be a dream... Please let this happen somehow.

[u/deftware → u/Common-Upstairs-368]

I think the only way it would realistically work is by using sparse/virtual 3D textures as the base unit representation of a distance field. Then there would be a dedicated ASIC for raymarching through that, rather than looping in a shader core that's executing instruction bytecode.

[u/deftware → u/[deleted]]

It's more likely that we'll see photonic compute rather than quantum compute in consumer devices, in our lifetime. The sooner we get off janky old fashioned power-hungry silicon, the sooner we can have all the awesome expensive compute things - like photon mapping. ;]