The raymarching technique is a fairly new technique used to render realtime scenes and it is entirely computed in a screen-space shader.
The raymarching is similar to traditional raytracing (in that a ray is cast into the scene for each pixel) but is not the same technique.
How this works:
We have in a fragment shader is the position of the point we are rendering in world 3D coordinates and the view direction from the camera.
For each ray is extended by step in the view direction, until it hits something and creates a point.
This is the simple raymarching used a constant step.
The next step is the optimization calls for the use of signed distance fields.
A distance field is a function that takes in a point as input and returns the shortest distance from that point to the surface any object in the scene similar with a sphere around the hit point.
Distance fields allow us to limit how often we need to sample when marching along the ray, this is the reason of the named raymarching.
You can follow this technique on the official video channel named The Art of Code.
The result of the source code of raymarching example from this video tutorial can be found on my account of ShaderToy website.
