NVScene 2015 Session: How to Create Content with Signed Distance Functions (Johann Korndörfer)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an excellent talk from a demoscene practitioner on how to build sophisticated scenes from distance functions.
What it is
Johann Korndorfer's NVScene 2015 talk on building content with signed distance functions. It focuses on patterns that make SDF modelling more structured, arguing that SDFs capture a shape's essence like vector graphics do compared with polygons or voxels.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2017 to 2018.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec westoncb · 2017-05 · on “How a 64k intro is made”
I think that's a pretty nice overview you have. One thing I would clarify is about how the objects in the scene are represented mathematically: it's done using 'signed distance functions' so every object you have in the scene is actually created through one of these functions which takes a point in 3D space and returns the distance to the nearest point on the object's surface to that point—which does, as you say, make the object/ray intersection testing trivial (the return value of this function is the radius of the sphere used to step along the ray). The other basic components when creating scenes to be raymarched are distance functions which combine other distance functions together. The s
Recommends Impossible · 2017-11 · on “Making WebGL Dance: How, Where, and What to Draw (2013)”
Hg ( [LINK] ) is a great resource. I'm not a fan of the non-commercial license. The intro on the top of the site has a lot of great links to resources outside of iq, including the pouet.net thread on Raymarching, John Hart's original sphere tracing paper, and enhanced sphere tracing, as well as the author's original talk from NVScene 2015 ( [this video] ). Definitely check out all of these resources. If you're more interested in signed distance fields outside of the shadertoy\demo scene use cases there are a lot of interesting resources out there written by people using them in more complex contexts. Alex Evans (Media Molecule) Dreams talk is awesome. You can see the talk here ( [LINK] ) and read
Recommends teamhappy · 2018-02 · on “Planet Shadertoy”
Here's a presentation from one of the mercury guys explaining how to do that kind of thing: [this video] Also, elevated from RGBA should probably be mentioned since iq ( [LINK] ) is the guy behind Shadertoy. (Also because it's pretty.) [LINK]