
Raymarching Distance Fields (2013) - Tomte
http://9bitscience.blogspot.com/2013/07/raymarching-distance-fields_14.html
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pierrec
I've been using this exact technique over the past couple of weeks (it's
addictive). If you're wondering what's new in this field, what caught my
attention the most is the appearance of visual SDF/raymarching editors.

These are all node-based environments that allow you to visually create
raymarching shaders and integrate them with other stuff. The main ones seem to
be in development for Unity and Unreal Engine, and there's also the "field
trip" pack for vvvv.

These are great for making the technique more accessible. That being said, I
think wouldn't use them for anything more than prototyping or exploration
right now. GPUs are still too weak for this, and creative optimization tricks
are very useful and often only achievable with plain old programming.

I'll just leave my favorite raymarched shader of 2018 so far:
[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4sVczV](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4sVczV)

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flafla2
I wrote an article on how to ray march distance fields in concert with
rasterization in Unity. If anyone’s interested check it out:
[http://flafla2.github.io/2016/10/01/raymarching.html](http://flafla2.github.io/2016/10/01/raymarching.html)

At SIGGRAPH this year, I also saw this raymarching toolkit that takes the idea
to a production-ready setting: [https://kev.town/raymarching-
toolkit/](https://kev.town/raymarching-toolkit/)

A cool example of the power of raymarching is the ability to raymarch complex
mathematical forms much more easily than with mesh-based methods, and with
infinite resolution. Here’s a cool paper on raymarching quaternion julia sets:
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/QuaternionJulia/](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/QuaternionJulia/)

