[mxmxnxor]

But don't you think that Dreams engine is the sight of more superior rendering approach than current triangles pipeline and will dominate in the future? Can't we achieve more in terms of performance and flexibility if we skip triangles pipeline and do all rasterization and pixel color calculation in computed shaders? For example you don't need to carefully choose tesselation level (or spend memory for many different zoom level lods and then trying to avoid lods switching artifacts) for models and fases with many smooth curves if you can do resolution independent rasterization straight from sdf/nurbs/b-splines in realtime. And it seems like having much less overhead due to 2*2 pixel overdrawing of many triangles just for visual curve effect.

[bartwr]

The whole point of my post was trying to answer why such approaches won't dominate (at least short and mid term, who knows long term!). :) We know "costs" of such a change - rewriting every single existing system, tool, offline software like Maya, retraining artists, figuring out from scratch how to do things like open world this new way... At the same time, do you know the benefits? Do you know if it's better, faster, have you measured it? I haven't and MM's goal also wasn't to be better or faster, IIUC the main drive was user editing content in new ways + painterly style of rendering.

And btw. artists absolutely hate modeling with nurbs, splines and anything similar. :) They love sculpting in ZBrush, or editing polys directly (for man-made and city objects). SDFs are +/- compatible with it (but come at huge memory and disk space costs - think of it this way, with meshes you encode "surface", so O(N^2) complexity, with SDFs volume, O(N^3), implicit representations not really...