bettersdf-raytracing
privatevalidated ray tracing for compact sdf volumes
a vulkan viewer and research harness for rendering bettersdf volumes directly instead of first extracting triangle meshes, built for a thesis & research project around work from mips at the university of milan and aueb. it compares conservative sphere marching with a semi-analytical dda path that solves the polynomial ray/sdf intersection inside each traversed cell, with selectable coefficient formats, interpolation methods and normal estimators.
the interactive viewer is built on nvidia’s nvpro_core2 and includes scene editing, conservative per-object screen bounds, picking, raw g-buffer inspection, slice views, screenshots and shader hot reload. gpu passes carry debug names, source information, timers and nvtx ranges for validation and nsight graphics profiling.
research workflow
a shared CPU reference library, validation tests and headless benchmark executable make the comparisons reproducible. using a sweep through all the possible parameters, the GPU methods are compared to the CPU double-precision result, recording performance as well as several metrics (RMSE, absolute difference) to evaluate correctness over performance.
status
feature-complete as a research environment rather than a reusable rendering library. the code is intentionally licensed restrictively while under active research.