Hey James, thanks for the kind words your add-on as early it is, looks very clean and great start, having more SDF Add-On is awesome and it will inspire all of us and together we can improve our tools, I inspired from other SDF apps to make mine, without them I couldn’t make what I have now, so don’t give up and continue it, yea I’m on Discord, Twitter (X) almost everywhere feel free to hit me up.
Hey everyone! I added new features to Rouge SDF Add-On:
Two major improvements, better memory management for exporting no more crashing and great improvements to the mesh export that can export million polygons very fast.
Interestingly I tried UPBGE, Range Engine and Armory Engine, after I played with them, I noticed all of my bake libraries were corrupted and I had to fix it and lead to this update in case something happens this guide will help the user! I genuinely didn’t understand what happened and why all of the scipy, scikit-image, PyMCubes, pyopenvdb, stopped working after playing with those game engines! but I fixed mine and this update will be helpful in case others experience the same thing.
You really shouldn’t tell users to delete their whole user data folder (step 3), this isn’t necessary and isn’t wise. You should refine your instructions to be more targeted
I improved the Guide, gave it more warnings to let the user to be aware, I added a guide to be able to copy on a text file with the commands to help the user to fix the problem step by step, I will update the add-on with these new features hopefully tonight.
I think the ultimate solution for SDF is an SDF Render Engine, right now in Blender we are using Volume, but the right way is a Render Engine that supports SDF like Dreams, Unbound and others…then somehow, we turn it to Mesh either with Volume to Mesh or other ways, as long as we don’t get a SDF Render Engine we can’t use SDF properly like what we have in Unbound, an SDF Render Engine that lets us see both SDF and 3D Polygon Meshes would be nice.
You’d think once Blender 5.0’s ray-marching shader result is visible in the view, that’s rendered ray-marching. If the ray-marching functionality is accessible via the Blender API, that should open the gates to Dreams-like SDF handling in Blender? But I hardly know anything about the new ray-marching functionality yet. If it’s only accessible through Geo Nodes, that’d be a handicap for developers who don’t want to do math using nodes.
I don’t know much myself in detail, but we have GLSL Shaders that we can show SDF Shapes and we have SDF Render Engine that uses C++ for the heavy calculations, Conjure SDF for example have its own Render Engine, GLSL shaders are more limited compared to SDF Render Engine, Ray Marching if I’m not wrong is just a math approach that in Blender they are doing it with Geometry Nodes with Volume and it’s limited to Volumes and I think it’s slower and limited for induvial unique shapes, an SDF Render Engine lets you add SDF Shapes way more and with awesome Performance at least better than GLSL and Volumes (I think), it’s the best way IMO, I had a good talk with James the Arcane SDF creator about this too, he made the base SDF Render Engine MIT license and I’m going to improve it and hopefully we can have a good SDF Render Engine for Blender and we all can use our SDF Add-Ons with it, this way we can do a lot more, until Blender Devs make one themselves one day.
If I’m not mistaking, ConjureSDF does use GLSL shading for its render engine, but it is a custom ray-marching renderer.
I just read that the new ray-marching in Blender 5.0 is a material thing done via the new Repeat node. It’s not built in ray-marching.
I.m.h.o., the Blender devs should spend some time and effort to dive into true raymarching-rendered SDF in Blender, and add a solid SDF modeling toolset, to not get behind the developments surrounding that rapidly emerging tech.
Last time I check Conjure SDF, we have to select the SDF Render Engine in Blender’s Renders section, and it has a complicated library for the Renderer in its Add-On Folder, So I think it uses an SDF Render maybe mixed with GLSL? but SDF Render Engine is there IMO we have to ask him to know for sure.
Thanks for the reminder, I still needed to do that, and I’ve done it now.
If I recall it correctly, last time there was no SDF modeling tools option. I entered that manually. The fact that it’s in the list this year gives me hope.
Made this using MaterialMaker with my custom nodes.
Now in Blender 5.0 with the repeat node and closure it could be possible to do something similar, but the render have to be “remade” in the shader, just like I did here.
So my custom MaterialMaker nodes could possible be made now in Blender 5.0!
It’s a shame that we can’t use Blender’s rendering engine with custom SDF shaders
Because the result is a shader I made a Shadertoy from it https://t.co/QYzjtyqql4
Added Group with some options for Rogue SDF Add-On, it’s not perfect but it helps with sorting the shapes in the Domain much better, I can’t move the groups up or down, it should be used for sorting mainly right now till I figure out how to fix that part.