3D Solid Text?

News & General Discussion
1

Anybody had experience of making 3D solid procedural text in Unity?

I made a game about 5 years ago just in C++ and OpenGL and it seemed to have inbuilt solid 3D text libraries. They were called Outline Fonts (as opposed to Bitmap fonts). Seems a bit odd Unity doesn’t have anything similar. Mind you Unity doesn’t have much out of the box.

Any recommendations for assets or code snippets? I want something like this:

As you can see this was from a “simple OpenGL tutorial” from Windows XP days. But doing the same thing in Unity is not possible unless you buy an expensive asset. Go figure.

2

Text Mesh Pro seems to be the biggest one I’ve seen.

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Thanks. That looks nice. But almost too good for my purposes. I only need simple extruded text.

I could write my own if I had access to these OpenGL tessellation functions. But I don’t:

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Text Mesh Pro is cool, but doesn’t do 3D solid text. FlyingText3D does, though. If you don’t need dynamic text, just make a model in Blender using the text function.

Not really, since it’s a fairly niche feature, and isn’t simple to do.

That’s a pretty bizarre statement. :wink: I wonder what all those millions of lines of code, and thousands of functions, are actually doing then…

–Eric

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OK. I’ll write my own then. Shouldn’t take me more than day.

6

Right, good luck with that. Here’s part of a support email I got a while ago:

“FlyingText is a godsend. The fact that it handles ttfs and works in the WebPlayer runtime just blew me away. It meant you’ve had to crack several relatively hard problems (glyph extraction, bezier curve tessellation, triangulation of concave polygons, etc). Respect for not taking the easy way out and providing a full .NET compliant solution. It dropped right into my project.”

Also, Unity is nowhere close to a “barebones engine” by any reasonable definition. If you define it that way, then all engines ever made are barebones engines at best. The Unity documentation folder is currently 358MB with 13,801 files. If that’s “barebones”, I’d hate to imagine a full-featured engine, and how many years it would take to learn it.

–Eric

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It’d take 0 days to learn, because all of the games you might want to make are already done. You just select it from a drop down menu, fill in some questions about art style and unique mechanics, and press “Ok”… :wink:

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Well it’s a good job Unity doesn’t have these things built in or you’d earn less money selling add-ons. :slight_smile:

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Then I’d do add-ons for things it doesn’t have built in, obviously. It’s not really feasible for any engine to include every possible feature that anyone might ever conceivably want.

–Eric