DistanceToNearestSurfacec Exclude Mesh from results without disabling Distance Fields for it?

Development Rendering
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Essentially I want to use a material on a mesh that make use of DistanceToNearestSurface but in order for it to work the results of the DistanceToNearestSurface needs to exclude its self.

The issue there is, I want this mesh with this material to get the distance fields from other meshes with the same material but if I have to disable affects distance field on the mesh then I can’t do this.

How can I keep my cake and eat it too?

I though about maybe doing a conditional check where if the DistanceField result is of a certain distance, ignore that and then when it exceeds it use the result but this didn’t seem to work as i thought it would.

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As far as I know the distance field has no way to distinguish whether the nearest surface is itself or something else. But you can sample the distance field from a different position. It’s common to offset the sample point (often along the vertex normal) from the mesh.

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Yeah I just did this and it seems to work for me for now. Thanks.