Signed Distance Field modeling with geometry nodes

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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So, I finally bothered to learn how to use geometry nodes and honestly, its confusing.

Still, I managed to cook up a way to generate meshes from signed distance fields that might be very useful in modeling so I decided to share.

I see a lot of potential for SDFs in geo nodes because unlike in add-ons or external tools, nodes gives us lots of flexibility on how to twist the coordinate systems and you can always come up with new distance fields procedurally based on your needs, unlike most SDF tools that limit you to a set of primitives.

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I am a big fan of Metaballs, and I have tried to figure out a lot of workarounds and hacks to get them to work in better and more useful ways.

However their limits are clearly defined and have been hit a long time ago, there is nothing else that can be done for them at this point.

Most likely is that Metaballs would need to go away and then something that is related to SDF comes in place.

Another point is that in terms of ā€˜development logisticsā€™ I find it very difficult to have such solution implemented from scratch. The most practical scenario is to embrace more the aspect of ā€˜node-based-toolsā€™ and create such environments, the same way as you do right now.

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You canā€™t have a thread like this without a @Metin_Seven present. :grin:

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@Musashidan: Did you bring a sacrificial goat for the high priest at least?
Or maybe one of the retro-arcade critters you recently made? :laughing:

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:grin:

We must first await the waxing of the 5th moon, else I brand thee heretic!!

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giphy

Did someone say ā€œSDFā€ ?! :laughing:

Nice experiments, @Jeacom !

Personally, up to now Iā€™m only moderately enthusiastic about Geo Nodes based SDF. It works nicely if itā€™s packaged in a real add-on, such as Blob Fusion, but if you look at the purely Geo Nodes based SDF Prototyper add-on, itā€™s plagued by UI issues, such as certain menu parameters not appearing or working anymore once you reload a scene, or certain nodes canā€™t be removed or swapped from the UI menu, due to a Blender limitation.

Then thereā€™s the overhead of using Geo Nodes for SDF. For example, both Blob Fusion (which uses Geo Nodes under the hood) and SDF Prototyper quickly slow down when using more taxing SDF elements, such as meshes converted to SDF or SDF curves.

Up to now, the only SDF add-on for Blender that has managed to escape from such issues is ConjureSDF, which comes with its own custom ray-marching render engine. The only major drawback of ConjureSDF at the moment is its incompatibility with Blender 4.0+ and Blender for macOS, but @JohnKaz is currently working hard to solve that.

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