> This demo renders images through a ray-tracing technique called Signed Distance Fields.
The first sentence on the site demonstrates a lack of understanding of the program. Signed distance fields are a representation of an implicit surface, which is sampled by fragments (pixels.) They have mathematical properties which make them simple to render in a realistic manner via something like ray-tracing or ray-marching. These properties also enable the fields to compose into more complex shapes.
juliusgeo 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think that phrasing was slightly misleading. I was attempting to make it more understandable for the non graphics programmer audience, but you are of course right that SDFs are not necessarily a technique solely for ray tracing, though I haven't really seen them used outside of ray/path tracers.
keithwinstein 1 days ago [-]
Cool! You might like our paper/demo on ray-tracing 1 TB-geometry scenes using thousands of AWS Lambda workers spun up just for the job: https://r2e2.dev/
This is really neat! Especially the global illumination that passes ray data between nodes, much fancier than what we've done here. You could imagine each component as an actor that receives messages via async channels (though perhaps it's more deterministic than that?).
I think bursting on serverless for massively parallelizable problems is a really interesting use-case. We were partially inspired for this demo by one of our users doing energy simulations at massive scale, who built a library called Scythe for this purpose: https://github.com/szvsw/scythe
abelanger 1 days ago [-]
Some more resources on signed distance fields (SDFs), which I didn't know about until this demo:
I love Hatchet! A serverless render farm is such a silly idea, results coming in felt really cool though, I'd love to see this scaled up to frames of an animation.
nla 1 days ago [-]
Some much needed innovation!
Well done, old boy.
ginko 1 days ago [-]
Isn't exposing something like this to the web asking for huge cloudflare bills?
juliusgeo 1 days ago [-]
Yes, we have a lot of various infra credits that we are using to serve this. Cloudflare workers are pretty cheap, though.
Unfortunately GPUs are also expensive. This is more so an exploration of the idea--there's a lot more performance that could be squeezed out of the actual rendering itself. Hatchet does let you use serverless operators with essentially anything that can serve two REST endpoints, though, so modifying this to use GPUs to render would be relatively trivial.
1 days ago [-]
omegaSigma95 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Woshiwuja 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 00:25:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The first sentence on the site demonstrates a lack of understanding of the program. Signed distance fields are a representation of an implicit surface, which is sampled by fragments (pixels.) They have mathematical properties which make them simple to render in a realistic manner via something like ray-tracing or ray-marching. These properties also enable the fields to compose into more complex shapes.
This was led by my former PhD student Sadjad Fouladi who did a lot of creative work involving swarms of short-lived serverless functions for video encoding and distributed LLM inference (https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi17/technical-sessions/...) and software compilation (https://github.com/stanfordsnr/gg).
This is really neat! Especially the global illumination that passes ray data between nodes, much fancier than what we've done here. You could imagine each component as an actor that receives messages via async channels (though perhaps it's more deterministic than that?).
I think bursting on serverless for massively parallelizable problems is a really interesting use-case. We were partially inspired for this demo by one of our users doing energy simulations at massive scale, who built a library called Scythe for this purpose: https://github.com/szvsw/scythe
- https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions/
- The 2D version: https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions2d/ (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380054)
- How Zed uses (used?) SDFs to render their editor: https://zed.dev/blog/videogame (discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35078464)