Can you explain signed distance fields?
TL;DRSigned distance fields are described as 3D textures giving the closest distance to a surface, letting particles know when they will hit geometry and conform to shapes like gas clouds, which already use them.
Okay. Well, my interpretation of it is that it's basically a 3D texture that can tell us the closest distance from a surface. So we would be able to use it, for example, I'm not going to make one live because it just wouldn't be fun to do. But this area here, this little box. Basically I could create a signed distance field from the geometry of this surrounding plinth. I can't really think what it would be called. But if I created a signed distance field for this, as well as having screen space collision, the particles are going to know the distance from that surface, so they're going to know when they're actually going to hit that thing. To give you some examples of where that's going to be really, really useful in the game, for gas clouds, for example, we already do have, to be fair, signed distance fields for the gas clouds, and we can make particles actually slow down, or rather than passing through the gas clouds, we can make them conform to the shape of the gas cloud. And it gives us a really nice way of layering extra texture onto the gas clouds to increase that resolution and make them look prettier.