>> There are also some clever tricks you can do to get soft shadows and
>> ambient occlusion for free.
>>
> Free ambient occlusion? How free?

Depends how accurate you want your AO :-)

> One type of AO from Fragmentarium requires 6
> samples to be taken from the DE. Because the DE is smooth, it makes for a nice,
> fast (not quite free) solution (also works with POV isosurfaces), but I wouldn't
> call it AO. It's a proximity pattern :)

Yes it depends how many rays and how far you want to step. You can also 
re-use the last primary ray DE value before intersection (and the 
initial shadow ray values) as an even cruder approximation.

When thinking about optimising distance field renderers I always get a 
feeling that you should be able to do something clever with voronoi 
diagrams but I have never worked out what yet...

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