SDF Viewer (demo below)
A fast and cross-platform Signed Distance Function (SDF) viewer, easily integrated with your SDF library.
A Signed Distance Function/Field (SDF) is an alternative approach to design 3D objects. In its simplest form, it is just a function that maps each point in 3D space to the signed distance to the closest surface of the object. It can underestimate the distance to the surface, but it can never overestimate the distance. A negative distance means that the point is inside the object.
SDF libraries will provide you with a wide range of SDF primitives, both 2D (rectangle, circle, text, etc.) and 3D (box, sphere, cylinder, triangle mesh, etc.), and operators (union, difference, intersection, extrude, revolve, etc.) to use in your designs. This application will take your code (written in any language) and quickly and interactively render it to a window. The main objetive of this app is to speed up the design/modeling phase by rendering the changes to your SDF as fast as possible.
I use this to design objects for 3D printing, but it can be used for any 3D modeling task. If you are looking for inspiration or want to learn how to build your own SDF library, check out shadertoy.
Features / future plans
- Cross-platform: desktop (Linux, Windows, MacOS) and web.
- MacOS is not tested but should work (help wanted for CI).
- Mobile support needs more work on the rendering dependencies.
- Cross-language: easy to integrate with most languages and frameworks.
- High-performance:
- Very-fast initialization on all platforms.
- Interactive framerate, even while loading (uses the GPU for viewing the SDF).
- Loads SDFs in several passes, increasing the level of detail in each one.
- Easily customizable:
- Different rendering materials (color, metallic, roughness...).
- Parameters to quickly customize your SDF from the UI.
- Compatible:
- Upload your SDF to a server and display it anywhere by adding ?cliurl=<url> to the link.
- Export a triangle mesh (importing should be provided by your SDF library).
- TODOs, FIXMEs and HACKs (any help is appreciated
😉 ).
Demo (try it!)
This example loads and renders an SDF with custom materials at the maximum framerate of 60 FPS on an integrated graphics card (i7-9750H). The initial load of the SDF is also interactive at 30 FPS (configurable): it quickly loads a low-resolution version of the object and iteratively increases the level of detail until the SDF is fully loaded. Parameters are configured from the UI, also rendering the changes in real time.
Building
All releases include builds for most platforms. Follow the release.yml workflow to learn how to build the project by yourself.
2 Apr 1, 2022
135 Dec 24, 2022
3 Apr 9, 2024
2 May 22, 2022
2 Feb 21, 2022
6 Feb 29, 2024
8 Dec 3, 2022
33 Feb 12, 2023
179 Nov 18, 2022
14 Dec 10, 2022
2.3k Jan 3, 2023
83 Dec 20, 2022
12 Jul 17, 2022
163 Dec 25, 2022
10 Jun 28, 2022
2.1k Jan 5, 2023
2.1k Dec 30, 2022
6.2k Jan 2, 2023
139 Dec 13, 2022