Raymarching a definition

Raymarching is a technique a bit like traditional raytracing where the surface

function is not easy to solve (or impossible without numeric iterative methods). In
raytracing you just look up the ray intersection, whereas in ray marching you march
forward (or back and forth) until you find the intersection, have enough samples or
whatever it is your trying to solve. Try to think of it like a newton-raphson
method for surface finding, or summing for integrating a varying function.

This can be useful if you:

Need to render volumetrics that arenot uniformRendering implicit functions,

fractalsRendering other kinds of parametric surfaces where intersection is not
known ahead of time, like paralax mappingEtc

Image 1: Traditional ray marching for surface finding

Related posts:

how-do-raymarch-shaders-work(GameDev.SE)