I've been using this exact technique over the past couple of weeks (it's addictive). If you're wondering what's new in this field, what caught my attention the most is the appearance of visual SDF/raymarching editors.
These are all node-based environments that allow you to visually create raymarching shaders and integrate them with other stuff. The main ones seem to be in development for Unity and Unreal Engine, and there's also the "field trip" pack for vvvv.
These are great for making the technique more accessible. That being said, I think wouldn't use them for anything more than prototyping or exploration right now. GPUs are still too weak for this, and creative optimization tricks are very useful and often only achievable with plain old programming.
A cool example of the power of raymarching is the ability to raymarch complex mathematical forms much more easily than with mesh-based methods, and with infinite resolution. Here’s a cool paper on raymarching quaternion julia sets:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/QuaternionJulia/
These are all node-based environments that allow you to visually create raymarching shaders and integrate them with other stuff. The main ones seem to be in development for Unity and Unreal Engine, and there's also the "field trip" pack for vvvv.
These are great for making the technique more accessible. That being said, I think wouldn't use them for anything more than prototyping or exploration right now. GPUs are still too weak for this, and creative optimization tricks are very useful and often only achievable with plain old programming.
I'll just leave my favorite raymarched shader of 2018 so far: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4sVczV