Suppose you have a cellular space like a grid or a quad tree or such. Each cell intersecting a shape (say, a triangle) records relative surface feature (say, a plane) that might be useful for recovering or extrapolating a nearest point on surface. Maybe a cell stores an authoritative surface feature, or maybe it can have several, doesn't really matter for this post.
Then, empty neighbors use that data to generate their own (non-overlapping) relative surface features.
Repeat that process until all cells are populated with information that says where the nearest thing is.
Anyways, I don't know if it's useful, and I don't have an immediate problem I'm trying to solve with it, but I'm curious to learn more about it and the idea feels too obvious to be novel so question for you smart people:
@aeva that sounds useful for 3D mesh reconstruction for 3D printing. You probably know the printer resolution in advance so you know grid denser than some threshold won't help
@demofox@aeva also more or less describes the mesh to SDF construction algorithm in my Github (shamelessly stolen from my PhD supervisor, I just added the cmdline interface)
@aeva@topher_batty this might not be what you are asking, but if you have information about what "thing" is closest to each point, I'd call it a voronoi diagram.
So long as there is a finite / discrete number of things, like if you were just storing an integer.
@demofox@topher_batty that makes sense! so essentially each pixel holds information about the closest voronoi edge, and the edge can be something like a surface crossing or some other thing
@natevw@zens sorta. What I have in mind is every point in space encodes some information about the nearest surface, which among other things might be useful for CSG, physics queries, and various geometric transforms, whereas she's talking about screen space geometry hints that might make the final image resolution independent. They're both methods for avoiding quantization though, so I see the connection you're drawing.
@efi imagine every empty cell in minecraft contained a bisecting plane parallel to the closest surface, as well as a distance value. a world where the air is made of broken glass and razor blades
@aeva neat, you could define the plane by its normal to the closest surface and then it's a vector field
it would kinda look a bit like gravity vectors, but discarding the mass and actual distance
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