Curious what’s the advantage of the SDF shapes… when creating shapes my mind always seem to go to ‘I want to quickly create shape using beakers, like in illustrator’ vs. thinking how to decompose and combine SDF shapes…

Anyone know why the SDF workflow?

Anyone know if there’s a node to simply author simple shapes using bezier like you would do in all other software in the world that deals with shapes?

Compared to vector shapes, you can do way more with sdfs. As the name says, they store distance values from the shape boundary, so there is "gradient" information that can be manipulated out of the box. There is no need to calculate round edges for a particular shape, simply a remapping in the positive direction. And since the calculation is fixed to a range of pixels (positions/vectors), creating patterns and thousands of shapes with the modulo operation is no big deal - and all operations like union, subtraction and morphing between sdfs as well. Collisions, just compare whether you're in negative or positive space, or calculate derivatives from sdfs to get a vector gradient field, then feed sims with that to drive particles or other cool stuff.

Thank you.

Anyone know if there’s a node to simply author simple shapes using bezier like you would do in all other software in the world that deals with shapes?

You can draw any shape you want with the curve sop and rasterize it.