> It all depends on what you want, but personally I don't like the idea. Even if
> that sample was added to three others (forming a camera-oriented tetrahedron),
> there's still a likelihood that those last DE samples will have been taken at
> different relative distances to the surface across the render. Does that make
> sense?

Indeed, my personal goal is to rather keep the scene moving at a decent 
frame rate (whilst adding more complexity) rather than towards a more 
realistic render.

>> 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...
>
> Hmm. Are you talking about breaking up the DE into separate regions, so that no
> particular region will have too many components (shape operations)? If so, what
> happens when a shadow or reflection ray needs to travel between regions?

Yes, I'm thinking that with complex scenes I am still always computing 
the distance field for every single object. What I think would speed 
things up is if you could group objects together and create a kind of 
much simpler conservative "group" distance function. I guess a kind of 
n-tree structure where you only need to do a relatively cheap check at 
each level to rule out certain nodes that you don't need to go down and 
evaluate any further. I guess POV does something similar.

You would do this for every distance field evaluation, so it wouldn't 
matter if a ray jumped from one region to another.

I'm also not sure if such a scheme would actually make much improvement 
on a GPU.

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