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Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

Signed distance fields _are not that bad_ (thank you Inigo Quilez)

Once you have your primitives, it becomes basic math and union, subtraction, intersection for the most part.

I made this shader a few days after learning the basics -> https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1494417750395179012

If glsl ever got function pointers or similar, you'd see simple SDF DSLs and frameworks bloom overnight and many of them would be easy and awesome.

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Raymarching ever-more-complex mathematical functions is neat if you're creating a demo out of curiosity or for art's sake.

But it's a very expensive and not-very-scalable method of rendering things, certainly not a replacement for meshes of triangles.

Shameless plug - I wrote sdf-csg[1] as an attempt to have that cake and eat it too. Basically, build things out of SDFs, then create meshes out of them for efficient rendering.

[1] https://github.com/wwwtyro/sdf-csg

This is very cool. I wish I could use it in unity!

Going to take a few minutes to scope out what a port would take...

Check out Fuse[1][2], it also has a SDF to mesh feature and since it is based on Stride[3] (C#) it might be easier to port.

[1] https://github.com/TheFuseLab/VL.Fuse

[2] https://www.thefuselab.io

[3] https://www.stride3d.net

Fair point.. and the response is also right on. I'd edit my original comment to say "...creating full interactive scenes of geometry and textures..." if I could :)

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