thanks!
it’s an interesting proposition. the cube-sphere transition could be achieved with a basic vertex-animation, though that’s the easy part. the blending between the cube-sphere and the ground/world would be much trickier, but I have some ideas around it.
the most reasonable alternative is probably marching cubes, which would allow for regular mesh-based rendering. it shouldn’t be too expensive to recalculate the mesh every frame if the effect area is small, and the mesh resolution could be adjusted for quality/performance.
another alternative might be some fancy vertex shader stuff, though I have no idea if that’s even feasible.
also, a hybrid approach might be viable — render everything with normal meshes, then do raymarching only in a small area around the player. the main bottleneck with raymarching is the amount of fragments, so this would greatly boost performance. it would require a lot of tuning to make sure it looks cohesive, though.
and finally, I want to mention that there’s a lot of room for optimizations when it comes to how I did raymarching. this was my first time experimenting with it, so it’s really amateurish. and I barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with raymarching… there’s a lot more potential here.