Raymarching & SDF
Raymarching with signed distance fields renders shapes from maths alone, with soft shadows, blends and fractals for almost free. These guides cover SDF primitives, operators, lighting and how to use raymarching inside Unity shaders. It is mind-bending the first time and very powerful afterwards. 45 hand-picked Unity guides, tutorials, videos and repos, kept current.
- Distance-field textures for infinitely sharp maps
Using distance-field textures in shaders to render crisp, vector-like map lines at any zoom.
bsky.app · Feb 2026 - Coding Adventure: Ray-Tracing Glassyoutube.com · Aug 2025
- Rendering Tiny Glades With Entirely Too Much Ray Marching
Pounce Light talk on Tiny Glade rendering: raymarched GI, tilt-shift DoF and stable shadows on old GPUs.
youtube.com · Dec 2024 - Volumetrics: Introduction to ray marching | Tutorial
Introduces volumetric ray marching in Unity.
youtube.com · ~Sep 2023 - Waterfall Shader Breakdown
Breakdown of a waterfall shader that parts around a sphere using signed distance fields.
cyanilux.com · ~May 2023 - Protean Clouds (Shadertoy, ~120 lines)
Shadertoy: compact raymarched volumetric cloud shader in about 120 lines.
shadertoy.com · Dec 2022 - Coloring Raymarched Volumetric Light Through Stained Glass
Colors raymarched volumetric light as it passes through stained glass, continuing a previous tutorial.
valeriomarty.medium.com · ~Aug 2021 - SDFs Part Two — Joyrok
Tech art post on distance fields, part two of the SDF series.
joyrok.com · ~Jul 2021 - What Are SDFs Anyway? — Joyrok
Explains signed distance fields and how they are used in tech art.
joyrok.com · ~May 2021 - Rendering a Sphere on a Quad
Ben Golus explains rendering a sphere impostor on a quad and improving how convincing it looks.
bgolus.medium.com · ~Jan 2021 - MudBun: Volumetric VFX Mesh Tool for Unity
Product page for MudBun, a volumetric VFX mesh tool that generates meshes procedurally.
longbunnylabs.com · Jul 2020 - Rendering volumetric clouds using signed distance fields – UHawk VR Development Blog
Renders volumetric clouds in Unity using signed distance fields.
blog.uhawkvr.com · May 2020 - Getting started with shaders: signed distance functions!
Introduces writing shaders using signed distance functions.
jvns.ca · Mar 2020 - Ray Marching for Dummies!
Beginner introduction to ray marching.
youtube.com · ~Jan 2020 - https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/045-spheretracing-depth/
Ronja tutorial on adding depth output to a sphere tracing shader.
ronja-tutorials.com · Oct 2019 - Handling Depth for Spheretracing
Handles depth when spheretracing signed distance fields.
ronja-tutorials.com · Oct 2019 - Raymarching in Unity
Introduction to raymarching in Unity shaders.
medium.com · ~Sep 2019 - https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/044-spheretracing-shading/
Ronja tutorial on shading and lighting for sphere-traced signed distance fields.
ronja-tutorials.com · Aug 2019 - Spheretracing with Shading
Shades spheretraced signed distance functions in a volumetric rendering series.
ronja-tutorials.com · Aug 2019 - https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/043-spheretracing-basics/
Ronja tutorial on sphere tracing basics for rendering signed distance fields.
ronja-tutorials.com · Jun 2019 - Spheretracing Basics
Introduces spheretracing, a raytracing technique for signed distance functions.
ronja-tutorials.com · Jun 2019 - 2D SDF Shadows
Builds 2D shadows using combined signed distance functions.
ronja-tutorials.com · Dec 2018 - 2D SDF Space Manipulation
Manipulates space for 2D signed distance function shapes.
ronja-tutorials.com · Nov 2018 - 2D SDF Combination
Combines 2D signed distance function shapes.
ronja-tutorials.com · Nov 2018 - https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/034-2d-sdf-basics/
Ronja tutorial introducing 2D signed distance field shapes.
ronja-tutorials.com · Nov 2018 - 2D Signed Distance Field Basics
Basics of drawing shapes with 2D signed distance fields instead of meshes.
ronja-tutorials.com · Nov 2018 - GitHub - electricsquare/raymarching-workshop: An Introduction to Raymarching
Repo: introductory raymarching workshop.
github.com · Nov 2018 - Shader Showcase Saturday #1: Volumetric Crystals
Creates volumetric crystals with shaders.
alanzucconi.com · Jul 2018 - SHADER/raymarching/raymarching clouds.glsl at master · danielscherzer/SHADER
Repo: GLSL fragment shader example for raymarched clouds from a shader programming lecture.
github.com · Jan 2018 - Ray Marching 16ms
Blog on a ray marching renderer that runs in 16 milliseconds.
michaelwalczyk.com · ~Jun 2017 - Creating a Volumetric Ray Marcher
Tutorial on creating a volumetric ray marcher.
shaderbits.com · ~Nov 2016 - Ray Marching and Signed Distance Functions
Explains ray marching and signed distance functions as used in demo scenes.
jamie-wong.com · Jul 2016 - Volumetric Rendering: Signed Distance Functions - Alan Zucconi
Explains using signed distance functions to build complex 3D shapes in a volumetric shader.
alanzucconi.com · Jul 2016 - Volumetric Rendering: Raymarching - Alan Zucconi
Explains the raymarching technique for volumetric rendering with clear shader code.
alanzucconi.com · Jul 2016 - Volumetric Rendering: Surface Shading
Adds realistic surface shading and lighting to raymarched volumetric rendering.
alanzucconi.com · Jul 2016 - Volumetric Rendering: Volume Raycasting
Volume raycasting for volumetric rendering (members-only post).
alanzucconi.com · Jul 2016 - Actually Making Signed Distance Field Textures With JFA
Explains generating signed distance field textures with the jump flooding algorithm.
blog.demofox.org · Mar 2016 - What is Ray Marching? Is Sphere Tracing the same thing?
Q&A explaining ray marching and how it relates to sphere tracing.
computergraphics.stackexchange.com · ~Sep 2015 - Shadertoy
Browser community for writing and studying GLSL fragment shaders, raymarching and procedural visuals.
shadertoy.com · ~Feb 2013 - Volume ray casting - Wikipedia
Wikipedia overview of volume ray casting and how it derives from the rendering equation.
en.wikipedia.org · Jan 2006 - Non-linear sphere tracing for rendering deformed signed distance fields
Research paper on non-linear sphere tracing for deformed signed distance fields.
cs.dartmouth.edu - Log-spherical Mapping in SDF Raymarching
Explains log-spherical mapping for SDF raymarching.
osar.fr - Coding Adventure: Ray Marching
Video experimenting with ray marching to render shapes in Unity.
youtube.com - Coding Adventure: Clouds
Video experimenting with rendering volumetric clouds.
youtube.com - Clayxels by Andrea Interguglielmi
Interactive volumetric toolkit for quickly sculpting assets in Unity.
andrea-intg.itch.io