Rasmus Gabelgaard Nielsen, Kenny Erleben
We present a fast, robust method for continuous collision detection (CCD) directly between pairs of complex signed distance fields (SDFs). By casting CCD as an alternating spatio-temporal optimization and driving a small set of smartly sampled surface points along SDF tangent spaces, our approach avoids dense sampling or triangle meshes entirely. The result is real-time SDF-SDF time-of-impact queries—often within 1 ms on a single CPU core—even for highly detailed, non-convex geometry undergoing fast spinning motion. This is, to our knowledge, the first practical CCD method operating directly on SDF pairs.