Show HN: Iridescent crystal with raymarching and signed distance fields

Show HN: Iridescent crystal with raymarching and signed distance fields(varun.ca)

159 points by winkerVSbecks 2 years ago | 7 comments

Const-me 2 years ago |

Looks very cool, but why? Unlike many other applications of SDFs, for this particular one a traditional rasterization seems more appropriate.

The polyhedron being rendered only has 32 vertices and 60 triangles. The indexed mesh gonna take 744 bytes of VRAM with FP32 coordinates and uint16_t indices, which can be reduced to 552 bytes by using FP16 coordinates. That’s less data than the GLSL source code to compute and render the SDF. Also, if MSAA is enabled rasterization will deliver better visual quality.

abstractbeliefs 2 years ago | |

That's true for _this_ polyhedron, but it's useful and more clear to demonstrate the technique with a simple example and allow the mind to then explore what else could be modelled this way than to blow someone away with complexity that they miss the point.

This is far more about SDFs than it is about the polyhedron.

tudorw 2 years ago |

wow, you made something complex understandable to me. I'd dabbled in shaders but Raymarching (I now know why it's called that!) and SDF had eluded me, thank you.

winkerVSbecks 2 years ago | |

Thanks, I'm glad the explanation was helpful. I'm always worried that my explanations make no sense to anyone.

Etheryte 2 years ago |

This is great, I spent more time looking through the linked demos than I would like to admit.

0xf00ff00f 2 years ago |

This is pretty cool, thank you for sharing.

hiveking 2 years ago |

That's neat