[jheriko]

its also possible to achieve similar effects using whittaker iteration as a 'sloppy but fast' alternative to the sphere tracing/distance field approach

there is not much good reference on it though (which is why i am compelled to self link)

http://software.intel.com/sites/billboard/article/star-chart... http://jheriko-rtw.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/whittakers-method-...

its less well known by far... Steven Wittens came across it, and I shamelessly nicked it, back when we were doing AVS presets for Winamp. Speaking of Winamp, back then Geiss (the author of this article) created Monkey - it used D3D and hardware acceleration iirc, but also rendered an isosurface similar to the method described in this article.

It was an interesting period of actual innovation in those days...