I have developed a new approach to rendering the scenes described by the SDF, which completely abandons the classic ray marching.
The idea is simple: instead of searching for ray intersections, we consider the scene as a potential field of view, where the source is the SDF itself. The solution of the field equation gives zero isosurfaces — they correspond to the visible boundaries of objects.
Advantages:
- natural coherence between pixels,
- analytical continuation for infinite resolution,
- adaptive computational load depending on the complexity of the scene,
- all the advantages of SDF are preserved (procedurality, Boolean operations, compactness).
The full description of the idea with basic formulas and concept is published on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17306506
It will be interesting to hear the opinion of the community:
- How feasible is the method?
- What potential applications do you see?
- Are there any similar approaches that I might have missed?