[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...