I had the same idea but with voxels. The idea works fine, more work on photorealism needed : https://youtu.be/LBzuXj21_bY?t=128

Reminded me of Red Faction, a FPS where you could destroy the environment.

Kind of like Quake in a Lemmings world.

This is quite more polished to say the least.

Using layers with settings about which SDFs interact with which layers for operations seems interesting. Like put trees in a layer and then have an axe that can negatively deform the trees but not the ground layer or something. Or a predator layer that can absorb things in the prey layer. Haven't really thought through.

You can't talk about terrain modification without mentioning "From Dust", which did it at a grand scale... 15 (!) years ago.

It allowed you to shape terrain with sand, water and lava. So terrain modification PLUS fluid simulation!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYUU3dv7WC4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dust

I watched this over the weekend and loved the approach. I’ve played with SDF for 3D modeling (even though the current libraries generate meshes for slicing using marching cubes, which is slow as heck and can lead to imprecision on small features), and wish I had more time for playing around with it.

The interaction with the terrain reminds me of Astroneer, although I don't know if that game uses SDFs.

Such impressive demos and great explanations in the video. Mike, if you're reading this, keep making videos!

Excellent technical presentation! Though the style itself is a bit too "clay-like", like I wouldn't expect a cube melding with the terrain sand to be a smooth glued connection. Is that some "inherent" SDF thing or just a style of the demo?

I use SDFs on my render engine to render text. It allows me to debug values inside shaders. (I can print value of an uniform, texture value etc.)

(It's a combination of line segments for each letter and digit)

Is there an easy way to go from Blender model to SDF?