Yeah, I'm going to explain this more in the video I'm making, but the idea is to cache the distance samples near the curve/surface and store them in a texture atlas for sampling when rendering.

- The reconstructed distance is inexact because bilinear interpolation produces a distance lower bound AND the smooth blend does the same. This makes finding points on the curve less efficient, but doesn't change the result.

(These animations are for a video I'm making!)

/end

- The reconstructed distance is highlighted in magenta.

- As before, the white curve is the analytic SDF and the yellow curve is what's reconstructed from bilinear interpolation.

2/

There's a lot to say about that, but at a high level, I'm using a "brickmap" that stores a pointer in each cell (which can be null) to the brick, which is allocated from an atlas. And then I use a clipmap centered around the camera with a number of levels for LOD.

Yep, my engine is SDF-based.

(In case you were wondering, the character depicted is Sir Potato Face.)

Indeed

It works! The dumping code is very short, and no loading code is needed (other than the code I copy/paste).

Sadly I don't think I will be able to model exactly Mr Potato Head as I removed ellipsoids from my engine.

Another funny thing is that the overlay in the UI here looks intentional but is actually just the debug rendering of the capsule shape :D

Good ideas. I haven't thought about the "mound" part too much yet but you're right there is definitely interesting design space there.

Ha, good question. The end game is ... a game. This started as a technical exploration, and right now I'm putting together a video on what I've built so far, so I'm re-exploring some older stuff for the video.

Then it's full steam on game dev!

Anyway, I'm glad this is done, as it was a pain in the ass to implement :)

/end