Sparse allocation/rendering of SDF bricks is now working! The pipeline is fully GPU-driven - a series of compute shaders that manages brick allocation/baking in a 3D texture atlas, followed by draw-indirect for rendering. Still a lot more work to do, including automatic LOD.

@chrisbe1968 These pointers are helpful, though, and I've been learning more about game physics recently so I would actually love to dive into this stuff more when I have more time and am not just trying to get something working quickly.

@chrisbe1968 Also worth re-mentioning that I'm rendering the SDF via sampling the SDF directly (and ray-marching baked volume textures), so that is done without a mesh.

@chrisbe1968 Maybe, but I'm not aware of straightforward ways to do this for arbitrary SDFs. A big complicating factor is that smooth blends (as well as subtractions) make the distance field a bound rather than exact, which means it becomes a lot harder to compute overlaps.

@andreintg Yeah, I think there is a significant random component, esp. in the first 30 minutes or so. But the bigger following you have I think the lower the randomness gets because you spin the wheel more times in the first 30 mins.

@andreintg .. the biggest response I've ever received. It is educational to see what does well, though often people seem to do the best with ranting and hot takes which I try not to engage in /shrug

@lucascassiano I'm using signed distance fields for the "smooth blends" and then marching cubes to generate the collision mesh for physics (but ray-marching of baked 3D textures for the rendering).

@zeelee3D Thanks! I have been trying to post regular updates with explanations of how things work, and I'm also planning a longer form video and/or article about it.

@GameDevMicah Ah nice, I have read a bit about their usage in UE.

@Yeltansss The main cost is regenerating the collision mesh when the (static) SDF scene changes. I think I can get that fast enough, though, as the collision mesh resolution doesn't need to be very high. I'm using Jolt physics and feeding it triangle meshes:

@flaratt_ljos My engine is mostly custom but I am using Jolt physics!

@TheThingInFull Will get a team of 7 engineers on that stat

@GameDevMicah What are mdf volumes?

@QuantumJos @Shockwave_App @donutcounty It is a cool mechanic. Have played Donut County in the past, maybe there are some more angles on it 🤔🤔

The video covers it up pretty well, but I'm actually just generating a single collision mesh "chunk" right now - so the obvious next step is to chunkify the whole world and add/remove chunks as the camera moves around. It's cool to see things more interactive! /end