[andybak]

I would imagine that's a fairly lossy process with some downsides?

Ideally - the end result of an SDF pipeline is pixels. Going back to polygons throws away much of the advantage of SDFs. Raymarching is costly and rarely used in realtime engines but Blender isn't realtime so rendering SDFs directly would probably be viable.

[dorkwood]

> Raymarching is costly and rarely used in realtime engines but Blender isn't realtime so rendering SDFs directly would probably be viable.

The viewport still needs to update in real time for it to be a viable modeling workflow, though, right?

[andybak]

It's a lot easier to handle realtime in an editor than in a fully featured game. There's less other stuff going on, you can take extra shortcuts and usually rely on higher-end hardware.

[dorkwood]

> It's a lot easier to handle realtime in an editor than in a fully featured game. There's less other stuff going on

I don't think that's true. Most games are optimized to limit the number of draw calls and textures. The viewport of a 3D software package has no such limits. As a result, my viewport rarely runs as well as the games I play.

In any case, that's besides the original point, which was that it wouldn't need to run in realtime. My argument was that it would.

It's not a completely impossible goal. Look into what some artists are making with Dreams on the PS4. It uses raymarched SDFs for modeling.

[andybak]

Point taken.

Small correction - Dreams isn't purely Raymarched SDFs. From recollection they ended up with a fairly hybrid approach.

[dorkwood]

I haven't read much about it to be honest. I know they must be doing something clever under the hood to make it run so we'll on that hardware.