Designing with distance fields

Abstract

Distance fields provide an implicit representation of shape that has advantages in many application areas; in this overview, we focus on their use in digital design. Distance fields have been used in Computer Aided Design since the 1970's (e.g., for computing offset surfaces and for generating rounds and filets). More recently, distance fields have been used for freeform design where their dual nature of providing both a volumetric representation and a high-quality surface representation provides a medium that has some of the properties of real clay. Modern computer systems coupled with efficient representations and methods for processing distance fields have made it possible to use distance fields in interactive design systems. This overview reviews previous work in distance fields, discusses the properties and advantages of distance fields that make them suitable for digital design, and describes Adaptively Sampled Distance Fields (ADFs), a distance field representation capable of representing detailed, high quality, and expressive shapes. ADFs are both efficient to process and have a relatively small memory footprint.