#procedural mesh

Yanko Oliveira’s Procedural Characters

Let’s get technical. You might remember Yanko Oliveira’s procedurally generated fairy chess, X, a Game of Y Z. Since then, Yanko’s been blogging about some procedural generation projects, including about the chess game and the thing I’m here to talk about this week: generating seamless character meshes.

A demon summoning prototype needs procedurally generated demons to summon, so Yanko has been working on procedurally generated characters. After a first pass in part one to generate the basic mesh and shader, there was a problem getting the modular mash pieces to join seamlessly. Yanko’s got a solution for that now, with a good walkthrough of the thought process that lead there and some Unity code illustrating some of the details.

Of course, now Yanko’s got to figure out how to rig and animate the characters. If you want to follow along, find some ideas for generating your own 3D characters, or have some suggestions for Yanko, I suggest you check it out:

ProcJam is coming, and that probably means that there are a bunch of you who are trying to figure out how to create meshes in Unity from scratch. 

Well, this video should help with that. While it is specifically focused on extruding a shape along a spline to create a new mesh, many of the technical details are important considerations for creating any mesh in Unity.

This stuff is also useful for people who aren’t using Unity, though some of the technical details will be different if you use, say, a right-handed environment.

Generating images is fairly easy; the format of the output is well-understood. But what if we want to make something three-dimensional? It’s not just enough to figure out where we want to put the vertices, we need to know how to assemble them into a visible object.

Here’s a tutorial for Unity, explaining how to take your points and turn them into mesh geometry.