Drawing text using SDF
In this recipe, we address the challenge of rendering crisp and scalable text, regardless of its size. By utilizing the principles of SDF, we transform traditional text rendering into a more fluid process, ensuring sharpness and clarity. The outcome is beautifully rendered text that remains clear and legible, whether you’re zooming in closely or viewing from a distance.
SDFs provide a way to represent surfaces. An SDF is basically a function that, for every point in space, returns the shortest distance to the surface of the shape. SDFs can be used for a variety of use cases such as volume rendering or to perform operations on shapes such as dilation, erosion, and other morphological operations.
Traditionally, text is rendered using bitmap fonts. One can use a 2D canvas to render text and then use that as a texture to draw a quad in a 3D context. However, this method creates bitmaps that are resolution-dependent and need to be generated and uploaded...
