The title of the Valve SIGGRAPH 2007 paper on signed distance fields (SDF) is important to pay attention to: "Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification of Vector Textures"...
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"Improved" -- not perfect. It's an approximation and fails in many cases. "Alpha-tested" -- not multicolor, monochrome only. "Magnification" -- not minification. No point in using SDFs if you aren't going to magnify shapes.
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Replying to @pcwalton
I used to be able to pick out a UE4 game just by seeing the way the text is rendered. Now everyone uses SDFs for basically everything, though. (Ex: TextMesh Pro.) Everything looked like it was ~98% opaque. Just slightly ghostly... even though it wasn't. Was really weird.
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Replying to @scottmichaud
It drives me crazy when people use SDF when rendering text at a fixed size. There's no point in SDF then! Just use a prerendered bitmap!
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Replying to @pcwalton @scottmichaud
Went down a bunch of wrong paths here b/c of that kind of hyper-specificity. Thoughts on WebGL 1.0-compatible for *tons* of zoomable text?
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Replying to @pcwalton @scottmichaud
Yeah I mistyped: millions of thick curves, not text. zoomable, but not necessarily that smoothed. More imp to have millions of curves, and ideally on-the-fly. We currently use cpu to approximate a bezier as a few line segments (= fake geom shader), then pan/zoom in gl.
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Look at Pathfinder 3 :) I think it’s about optimal for this use case. I’ll be blogging about it soon.
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