Comment by ferbivore
14 days ago
Not a question but some unsolicited (sorry) feedback. The intro seems designed to set people up for disappointment. You start off by talking about AA methods used for 3D scenes, and you've picked a very cool way to present them... but the article is actually about antialiased drawing of SDFs, which is not exactly a hard problem and not applicable to 3D scenes. Unless your scene is made up of SDF shapes, but I don't think the method you're presenting would be fast enough on a nontrivial scene as you would need to rely on alpha-blending across seams. (I think Alex Evans' talk on Dreams mentions they tried something similar to get fuzzy shapes but dropped it due to perf and sorting issues.) In any case, it would have been nice for the article's intro to more clearly say what it's about and what the technique is useful for.
True, this is something I struggled with writing and ended up with just a small note commenting that this is not widely applicable. Will clarify more in coming posts. It's all incredibly context specific. The reason for this order, is that you can very much can use all these approaches (SSAA, FXAA, MSAA etc.) for rendering simpler shapes and HUDs. So going through them, where these approaches break down and when it does make sense to go the extra mile with SDFs.
Still, non-standard rendering approaches are very much a thing [1] and I could see setups like [2] be used in scientific particle visualizations.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U0XVdvQwAI
[2] https://bgolus.medium.com/rendering-a-sphere-on-a-quad-13c92...