Improved Corners with Multi‐Channel Signed Distance Fields

Abstract

We propose an extension to the state‐of‐the‐art text rendering technique based on sampling a 2D signed distance field from a texture. This extension significantly improves the visual quality of sharp corners, which is the most problematic feature to reproduce for the original technique. We achieve this by using a combination of multiple distance fields in conjunction, which together provide a more thorough representation of the given glyph's (or any other 2D shape's) geometry. This multi‐channel distance field representation is described along with its application in shader‐based rendering. The rendering process itself remains very simple and efficient, and is fully compatible with previous monochrome distance fields. The introduced method of multi‐channel distance field construction requires a vector representation of the input shape. A comparative measurement of rendering quality shows that the error in the output image can be reduced by up to several orders of magnitude.We propose an extension to the state‐of‐the‐art text rendering technique based on sampling a 2D signed distance field from a texture. This extension significantly improves the visual quality of sharp corners, which is the most problematic feature to reproduce for the original technique. We achieve this by using a combination of multiple distance fields in conjunction, which together provide a more thorough representation of the given glyph's (or any other 2D shape's) geometry. This multi‐channel distance field representation is described along with its application in shader‐based rendering. The rendering process itself remains very simple and efficient, and is fully compatible with previous monochrome distance fields.