It's a pet peeve of mine for people to suggest blurring as a "fix" to aliasing problems. Hacks are fine for one-offs, but I love how this clearly shows it's a sampling problem and what tools can do to address it.
I'm looking for some resources for signed distance functions and something beyond min,max etc. I'm aware of iq's website and all the things that have "made rounds" around internet.
Hard to know what to suggest as you make it sound a bit like you've seen everything! If you've read everything on iq's site and followed all the links then you've covered a lot of the the available material.
I’ve done that but I feel like I’m still lacking some theoretical foundation. It might just be practice. Im aware of that project, it’s dope but I guess my question is how do I go from boxes to the insane shit lol.
E.g I’m not super comfortable creating my own sdfs that aren’t just a combination of the geometries from hg.
> E.g I’m not super comfortable creating my own sdfs that aren’t just a combination of the geometries from hg.
Leaving aside complex fractals - isn't it all about combining simple primitives? It's a bit like saying "I understand the basic chords but how do I write a song?"
The basic ingredients are shapes and domain transforms of various kinds. The rest is artistry.
Hg (http://mercury.sexy/hg_sdf/) 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8nFqwOho-s). Definitely check out all of these resources.
Voxel Quest (http://www.voxelquest.com/), a "failed" kickstarter project, has some good write ups of how he's built the engine over the years as well as source code.
There are of course more resources than that, and just browsing shader toy and reading people's shaders can give you a ton of knowledge, but that's the short list of resources that I've found enlightening over the years.
Gah, I saw a youtube video where someone walked you through signed distance fields live. It was really great. Keep Googling, you'll find it! Good luck!
(Also, after the first few slides in the animation, there are some pretty cool animations).