Show HN: SDF-Field Synthesis – rendering SDF without ray marching

2 points by LaghZen a day ago

Hello, HN!

I have developed a new approach to rendering the scenes described by the SDF, which completely abandons the classic ray marching.

The idea is simple: instead of searching for ray intersections, we consider the scene as a potential field of view, where the source is the SDF itself. The solution of the field equation gives zero isosurfaces — they correspond to the visible boundaries of objects.

Advantages:

- natural coherence between pixels,

- analytical continuation for infinite resolution,

- adaptive computational load depending on the complexity of the scene,

- all the advantages of SDF are preserved (procedurality, Boolean operations, compactness).

The full description of the idea with basic formulas and concept is published on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17306506

It will be interesting to hear the opinion of the community:

- How feasible is the method?

- What potential applications do you see?

- Are there any similar approaches that I might have missed?