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pcwalton's profile
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
@pcwalton

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Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Research engineer at Mozilla

San Francisco, CA
pcwalton.github.io
Joined November 2009

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    1. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 27 Apr 2019
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      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"...

      1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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    2. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 27 Apr 2019
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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.

      3 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    3. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 27 Apr 2019
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      I see a lot of use of SDF when it's either insufficient (e.g. detailed small text) or overkill (e.g. text rendered at a fixed size). Remember: SDF is not "how you render text on GPU". It's just improved alpha-tested magnification.

      2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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    4. Nicolas Silva‏ @nicalsilva 28 Apr 2019
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      Replying to @pcwalton

      SDFs have their niches. They work great when you need not-perfect-but-okay small text with frequent non axis aligned transforms (maps, etc. ). Hard to beat in simplicity/speed for that type of things if you ship the SDFs pre-generated. Granted it's not a general purpose solution

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
    5. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 28 Apr 2019
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      Replying to @nicalsilva

      Is it really that much better than just rotating bitmaps? The differences shouldn't be great. BTW, I think that unless you're doing shadows and outlines SDFs are mostly isomorphic to bitmaps. i.e. you can convert a bitmap pixel to a distance value.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    6. Nicolas Silva‏ @nicalsilva 29 Apr 2019
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      Replying to @pcwalton

      SDFs are less blurry than bitmaps when transformed. While they don't retain full smoothness/"pointiness" of the shape, they can do sharp edges. The difference is that you compute the aa on the real pixel grid after tranform rather than before and then resampling due to transform.

      2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
    7. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 29 Apr 2019
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      Replying to @nicalsilva

      Sure, but you can do that with regular antialiased bitmaps too. You just need to convert from pixel coverage to distance. It turns out that while not quite the same they’re highly correlated to within 5% (the formula is in WR actually, see distance_aa)

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    8. Nicolas Silva‏ @nicalsilva 29 Apr 2019
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      Replying to @pcwalton

      Interesting. I didn't think it would work that well. So maybe we shouldn't bother with rasterizing transformed text in screen space when there is no sub-px aa

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    9. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 29 Apr 2019
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      Replying to @nicalsilva

      Well, it’s just a hypothesis. Needs to be tested. I think the characteristic “wiggly sides” of alpha-tested magnified bitmaps are actually small graphs of pixel coverage vs. distance.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 29 Apr 2019
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      Replying to @pcwalton @nicalsilva

      Unfortunately the errors magnify when you do the conversion and you still get wiggly lines. :( Oh well.

      2:18 PM - 29 Apr 2019
      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        1. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton 29 Apr 2019
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          Replying to @pcwalton @nicalsilva

          BTW I’m pretty sure you can generate SDF very quickly if you have the appropriate rasterizer. It’s just that few people do it that way.

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