SDF VS kons-9

I am in very early stages of writing a graphics engine in Lisp that uses SDFs, but the progress is slow (lack of experience, plus need to focus more on a new job and less on hobby projects). If you are also interested, here'a a repo full of all kinds of research work to implement a SDF based engine.

Very cool. I must check this out.

I implemented some L-system features in my 3D Common Lisp system: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

In some small way I am revisiting the idea with https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

We'll see what comes of it.

I began my 3D graphics development on a Symbolics workstation at the MIT Media Lab in the mid-80's. This was before the S-Graphics suite was released. [0]

The outstanding feature of the S-Graphics suite was the polygonal modeler which used a winged-edge structure that was far ahead of its time. It survives conceptually in the Wings3D system, which is a quite faithful copy of that modeler.

And of course you got the extensibility that came with the graphics system being built on Lisp.

But Symbolics was never, as far as I saw, a serious or popular contender in 3D production. Not only was the system expensive, but the hardware could not keep up with SGI's graphics abilities. Furthermore, the mass of CG developers at the time came from a C/Unix background, and rendering especially was so speed critical that C (and Fortran) resulted in faster systems.

Almost 40 years later, I have returned to the idea of developing a 3D system in Common Lisp [1]. We shall see where it leads.

[0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking...

[1] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

If you are interested in 3D graphics, I have tried to keep my code simple and comprehensible: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

As a solo developer of my 3D system, my main focus has been to keep the enthusiasm and momentum going and to enjoy the development process, rather than worrying about how the code might not be optimal in various regards.