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I am building a simulation game that and I that allows the player to create procedural buildings rather than placing static scenery items. If possible, I would like to write a shader that can take the vertices, normals, tangents, etc. and generate an identical mesh distance field so that I can leverage UE4's distance field ambient occlusion and so that various materials can detect generated geometry.

One project that appears to successfully achieve this is the Voxel Plugin. I have looked at the source but I am stumped as to where to start. I failed to find solid resources about this topic online. However, I did find this resource techniques to generate distance fields but this is not clear enough. I Any help is much appreciated. Thank you.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ A voxel plugin is likely generating its distance field from the voxel representation (relatively easy/cheap), not from a mesh (difficult/expensive). You can leverage something similar: the operations you use to build up your procedural buildings might have associated structural information you can use to compute a distance field faster than treating the end result as a raw mesh/polygon soup. Try editing your question to walk us through the tools the player uses to create buildings, and we might be able to help you find those opportunities. \$\endgroup\$
    – DMGregory ♦
    Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 2:28
  • \$\begingroup\$ @DMGregory can you expand on that? I want to generate mesh distance fields for my meshes that I am generating at runtime. I'm generating those meshes from voxel data so I think it should be possible and not too expensive to do at runtime. My question is how exactly can it be done? Should I create a separate question? This one was obviously abandoned by JronFrt. \$\endgroup\$
    – lukad
    Commented Jun 4, 2021 at 10:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ First, you should follow the guide here to merge your accounts. Then you'll be able to edit your question above to add details about how you are generating those meshes from voxel data. \$\endgroup\$
    – DMGregory ♦
    Commented Jun 4, 2021 at 10:36
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for your reply. But that is not my account :) I just happen to have the same question. \$\endgroup\$
    – lukad
    Commented Jun 4, 2021 at 13:15

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