bettersdf-raytracing

an opengl demo for rendering bettersdf volumes directly, built for a thesis/research project around work from mips at the university of milan and aueb. before this, the practical rendering path was to preprocess the data structure into a triangle mesh; this tries the more direct route by loading the volume into a 3d texture and adapting sphere marching to the bettersdf representation.

the shader can sample the sdf through software trilinear interpolation or hardware texture interpolation, then compare analytical normals against central-difference variants. there is also an analytical dda-style marching path that solves per-cell ray/sdf intersections with polynomial root finding instead of only taking conservative sphere-march steps. the app wraps that in an imgui scene editor with multiple transformed objects, material controls, coefficient quantization, sdf slice views, bounding-box/debug visualizations, shader reloads, screenshots and benchmark runs.

status

feature-complete as a research demo, not packaged as a reusable renderer. the code is intentionally private/restrictive for now because the underlying work is still in research.