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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

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preommr·

SDFs are pretty cool.

They come up from time to time. For example, Womp3D[0] uses them.

[0] https://womp.com/

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SDFs are cool, but they have the problem that they become very slow very fast. If all you want are a few abstract shapes they're great. But, as soon as you want something more real world, they slow to a crawl.

It depends. High complexity with SDFs is possibly cheap. It just has to be procedural. For example a single 3D-cube has the same computational cost like an infinite array of 3D-cubes in SDFs.

Yeah their neatness is certainly not as a replacement candidate for the good old 100000s-of-on-screen-meshes via millions-of-on-screen-triangles 60+FPS real-time rendering. Instead cool as a primitive / toolbox item for all kinds of "authoring"-related side quests. Font rendering too. Or shadertoy.com ray marchers, or goopy 3D design as GP linked to (to then export as meshes, naturally).

How are they used in font rendering out of curiosity?

This very well explained here https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and with more details in linked pdfs.

Basically, signed distance fields allow high resolution renders from low resolution rasters which represent character shape.

It's used by many web font rendering libraries esp for maps

Doesn't Adobe Medium use SDF? Manages a good level of sculpting complexity.

Presumably it's bucketing the interactions somehow to remain fluid.

Thanks for reminding me about womp! I was thinking about it when writing my last newsletter and couldn't remember the name.

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