Rendering of SDFs

[theottm]

Raymarching a SDF directly is faster that sampling it to a mesh and rendering that. I even heard that raymarching an SDF is faster than raytracing triangles from an existinh mesh for photorealistic rendering (lots of bounces). Is that true?

The only raymarching algorithm I know is basic sphere marching. Maybe there are better approaches?
One thing I always wondered was if one could use the gradient of the SDF (so a vector field) to optimize the number of steps (for example when a ray goes almost parallel to a surface).

One big question is how to pass our SDF to a fragment shader, so how to convert CL to GLSL. These might help: varjo, 3bgl-shader.

[ghost]

[theottm]

Nice, thanks for the references, I'll try to dig into that later. I already implemented a simple sphere tracer that just works in shadertoy, but I'm curious about going at it with a precise theoretical framework.

[theottm]

I don't know the SDF of an immersed Klein bottle, but I tried rendering quadrics, using their defining quadratic equation as a "SDF", turned out it doesn't work well :)

[ghost]

[theottm]

Yes it's not the biggest of our questions probably :) we can do it

[ghost]

[theottm]

Thanks for sharing! I'll have a deeper look when I start playing with an implementation

[ghost]

[theottm]

I get it. Keep going ;)