msdf-atlas-gen VS msdfgen

There are tools for making sdf textures like this(msdf-atlas-gen). It has a windows executable to generate the textures.

Here is the library in question: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdf-atlas-gen

I'm rather new to computer graphics, and after working on the Vulkan tutorial (https://vulkan-tutorial.com/) I started trying to render a Multi-channel Signed Distance Field (https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdf-atlas-gen).

I'm am fairly new to Vulkan and graphics programming as a whole, and I'm currently trying to render text from a SDF Font atlas (the file is a bitmap). I used the MSDF-atlas-generator to get the atlas and used a boost library to parse the json file which contained the atlas bounds for the specific characters. With the default shader code I have written, (from Vulkan tutorial) my characters render but with a soft edge as in how they're shown in the atlas.

Floating text. This was long overdue, and was kinda reminded of its importance from /u/nesguru 's updates (similar tileset, but Legend already has floating text). So, I went on to implement something. While I'm using Unity, I do not want to use that "£!$%^ Canvas system, and TextMeshPro (which is the go-to solution for such text) uses Canvas, so ... I had to roll my own solution! There's a paper from Valve for SDF fonts, and some nice person developed an extension for that, which addresses a few issues. So, I went on to implement that, which involved picking some free font online (I chose Roboto Slab from Google Fonts), converting it into a texture, preparing a special JSON with configuration, and a few shaders and a special particle system later, Let There Be Text!. I copied a bit the idea from Tangledeep where floating text goes into random directions sometimes (although there's a now-fixed bug in the video, and text goes left-ish only), and I've also added support for a typewriter effect to be used in certain cases (when characters talk in to-be-developed cutscenes etc)

For those asking for code, the atlas generation code is a library here: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdf-atlas-gen Admittedly it’s hard to figure out the api, since it’s undocumented, and I had to sort of piece together the correct way to use it by reading through the source code for the console app. I may write up a small tutorial somewhere to help the next person, if I get the time and find a place to post it.

I think I might be using (maybe my fork of) https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdf-atlas-gen with some cxx-rs bindings for the text rendering portion of things; I'm curious, would you be interested in such a crate?

msdf-atlas-gen is a version specifically for text.

This very well explained here https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and with more details in link d pdf.

Basically, signed distance fields allow high resolution renders from low resolution rasters which represent character shape.

No idea how to help you but I will just drop this since it improved the quality for me by 1000 https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

And that's the complicated state of the art version for 3D perspective. Other versions are even simpler.

This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”.

https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

I use this, free and has been very good for me https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

Distance fields are not slow to render. They don't need a powerful gpu. Valve was already using SDF for textures in 2007 and released a paper about it. MSDF (multi channel signed distance fields) is a popular text libraries for game engine devs that uses distance fields. Distance fields are fast to render in 2D and even 3D. The problem is with everything around it. Lighting, shadows, shading will all require specialized tooling and likely a specialized engine for very little benefit (imo).

Signed distance fields only work well for relatively simple characters.

If you have highly detailed characters like Chinese or emojis, you need larger resolution to faithfully represent every detail. One way to get around excessive memory requirements is to store the characters in their default vector forms and only render the required characters on demand, but then you might as well render them at the required pixel resolution and do away with the additional complexity of SDF rendering.

SDFs are still useful though if you have to render text at many different resolutions, for example on signs in computer games, as seen in the original paper https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

In the past, SDFs also had problems with sharp corners, which has been solved in https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

MSDFGen looks pretty sweet. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen