More Raymarching Resources

Raymarching and related techniques are an active area of research.

Online

Jamie Wong’s Raymarching and Signed Distance Functions

Very clear explanations with interactive demos describing what raymarching is and how to build up a shader that does it.

hg_sdf (local copy)

The demogroup Mercury’s glsl library of SDF primitives and “space-folding operators.” Super readable code!

iq’s SDF pages

These and his Shadertoy examples are some of the best places online to go to learn.

White Papers

Sphere tracing: a geometric method for the antialiased ray tracing of implicit surfaces by John C. Hart

The earliest paper and description (the particular kind used here at least) of raymarching I’ve seen.

Enhanced Sphere Tracing (local copy) by Keinert, Schäfer, Korndörfer, Ganse, and Stamminger

Contains some optimizations and clever tweaks to the classic raymarching algorithm for producing nicer looking images, faster.

Numerical Methods for Ray Tracing Implicitly Defined Surfaces (local copy) by Morgan McGuire

Useful summary of primitives and operations, as well as implementation details of some of the optimizations in “Enhanced Sphere Tracing.”