Post by Metin Seven in Arcane SDF comments

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Hi James,

Thanks for your reply. I did try Show in Viewport, and I guess the macOS issue may be due to the difference between Windows and macOS graphics libraries. MacOS uses Metal, which should be addressed correctly from the latest Vulkan-oriented Blender API. But if there are OpenGL calls anywhere in your add-on, it probably won't work on macOS.

Does the viewport hijack involve ray-marching, or are you live-meshing the SDF volumes? The ConjureSDF add-on comes with its own custom ray-marching renderer, which proves to be difficult to get right in Blender for macOS, due to some API issues.

By the way, I've added Arcane SDF to my Big SDF Thread over at the Blender Artists forum.

PixonixStudio71 days ago

Hi Metin, Sorry for the delay, my wife's been travelling for over a month and she just got back, so i decided to take a break for a bit. Yeah, like i said the fragment shader is a glsl shader so it is using OpenGL. Also to answer your question, yes ray marching is used in the viewport shader. Meshing is only done during the conversion process and is quite intensive, depending on the resolution, bounding size, and voxel count, it can take several minutes on my machine(but my machine is running a 13 year old i7, which is less powerful than a current gen i3, plus I've only got 32gb of DDR3, really the only thing allowing me to do 3D at all is i have an RTX4060, but even that is bottlenecked by the older hardware it's connected to, lol. ) to output a mesh using Marching Cubes method from OpenVDB. There are several other custom meshing techniques hidden in the addon, such as Marching Cubes, Extended Marching Cubes, Dual Contour, etc. But unfortunately i wasn't able to get them working without excluding or reversing faces on the final mesh, so i disabled them in the UI and figured I'd circle back later to get them working properly.

It's funny you mentioned ConjureSDF, because that was my inspiration for making ArcaneSDF. Obviously Arcane is nowhere near as cool as Conjure, but I'm super poor at the moment and can't afford ConjureSDF, so i made my own to play with. Additionally, I've got a standalone SDF modeler I've been working on called Phantom Mesh, because I can't afford plasticity, lol. And while i was at it i thought it would be cool to make a 2D SDF Drawing App, so i did, i call it Phantom Canvas. Neither of the standalone apps are available yet, but hoping to get them out soon.

Thanks for adding me to your Thread, it's helped quite a bit in boosting my views and downloads. I Had no Idea that there were so many other SDF applications out there, I'm particularly interested in Unbound Engine and SDFModeller, so thanks for giving me the link. If you're interested, I'd live to chat in a DM on discord or something my name is james_42pixels or my id is 454943649898430464.

Metin Seven71 days ago

Hi James,

Many thanks for your reply. I totally understand. Too bad I won't be able to check out Arcane SDF for the time being, due to being on MacOS. 🥲

I wish you good luck with the further development of your SDF tools. 👍

PixonixStudio70 days ago

Well, I'm not giving up just yet. I was fiddling around with blender last night and quickly remembered why my addon doesn't support vulkan. I use 4.2LTS because some of the add-ons I use break in newer versions, like my copies of BoxCutter and Hard ops that I bought in a humble bundle last year(those versions don't get updates). Therefore I targeted 4.2LTS when building the addon. I did however test in 4.5, but only in OpenGL(it worked fine. However 4.5 running Vulkan made blender very unstable and crashy. So I gave it up without too much troubleshooting. That said, since the panels and empties show up for you, it should be a simple matter of converting the glsl shader to Spr-v and adding a check to see which renderer blender is currently using and swapping the shader out. I'll have to do some research on a few things, of course, like if blender is able to compile Vulkan shaders or if they need to be precompiled, etc. but I'm going to look into it and see what I can figure out, I'll keep you updated.

Metin Seven70 days ago

That would be great, thanks for considering making Arcane SDF work on macOS. Be sure to let me know if you'd like me to test anything. I can start Blender via the Terminal and send you the output, including errors if there are any.

Metin Seven65 days ago

Hi James,

Just wanted to mention that Blender 5.0 includes native ray-marching. It'd be great if you could utilize that for Arcane SDF. It would probably solve the macOS issues as well.

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