Signed Distance Fields (SDFs)

Signed Distance Fields is a way to represent 3D models as implicit surfaces. to use them in video games you may want to turn them into a mesh.

Important resources

• Inigo Quilez is the godfather of Signed Distance Functions, and have excelent information about them on his site.

• Geometric tools

Meshing algoritms

Algoritm	How to handle LODs	Libraries	Other references
Marching cubes	Transvoxel
Surface Nets	Skirting / stitching	fast-surface-nets-rs, GDvoxelTerrain
Dual Contouring	Can work on octrees		Dual Contouring Tutorial
Compact Isocontours by Moore and Warren (1995)			Supposedly used in Spore?
Screened Poisson Reconstruction		PoissonReconstuction

People building intersting SDF / Voxel engines

0 FPS

• blog

Ethan Gore

• youtube

CodeJar

• youtube
• blog
• github

bonsairobo / DreamCat Games

• blog
• youtube
• Rust library: fast-surface-nets-rs
• Old project: building-blocks
• Libraries: github list

Miguel Cepero / Voxel Farm

• youtube
• blog

Nick / ngildea

• Nick's Voxel Blog
• Dual Contouring: Seams & LOD for Chunked Terrain
• Github
• youtube

Sebastian Lague

• youtube

Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou creator of MudBun

• Blog
• Twitter
• MudBun
• MudBun Unity Asset store

Matt Keeter

• Website
• Fidget project overview
• Fidget github

Interesting talks

No Man's Sky

• Building Worlds in No Man's Sky Using Math(s)
  • talks about noise functions
• Continuous World Generation in 'No Man's Sky'
  • overall architecture for how generation works
    • Planetes store voxels as cubes that gets mapped onto a sphere
    • Octrees
    • Dual Contouring
    • Triplanar Texturing (not locally, but across the whole sphere)
  • Lot's more interesting details in the talk

Matt Keeter

• Implicit Surfaces & Independent Research
  • Massively Parallel Rendering of Complex Closed-Form Implicit Surfaces
    • Paper of the same talk
  • Lipschitz Pruning: Hierarchical Simplification of Primitive-Based SDFs
    • A different paper from someone else, that I belive does most of the same?

Articles

• Voxel Planets: Procedural generation of planets with dynamic terrain

• Dual Contouring Tutorial

• 2d Contouring

Raymarching

Instead of turning the SDF to a mesh one can use Raymarching to render it directly. It seems like combining meshing for collitions and raymarching for real time changes could be smart.

• Painting with Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching

• Some cool examples of what can be done

Other techniques

• Voxel Displacement Renderer — Modernizing the Retro 3D Aesthetic

Assets

• Phyronnaz / VoxelAssets