Generating objects/meshes realtime and custom shaders

Unity Engine
1

Hiya,

I’m new to Unity, having started out formatting my game designs around XNA and being recently referred to Unity through another forum (devmaster.net). I’ve developed my own algorithms for lighting and vertex and polygon manipulation which almost led me to just code my own engine on my own. However, I’ve seen that I can probably utilize an existing engine and/or API to build my designs around, and I’m hoping that Unity provides enough low-mid level coding abilities to fit the bill. Several key things I’m looking to do…

-Custom shaders for polygon and per-pixel lighting; basically, I need to be able to totally control all lighting functionings with custom algorithms.
-I need to be able to generate basic meshes in-game and then use custom algorithms to “mold” them realtime.
-I need realtime access to line segments; manipulate them in the code
-Total control in the AI department
-I also would like the ability to create, form, and animate objects within Unity without prior 3D model importation. More specifically, I want to be able to, like in something like OpenGL, input vertice points via code and manipulate and animate the resulting models via some of my own algorithms.

So, is this all doable in Unity? I’ve been starting to hop around tutorials and this forum; it looks really promising.

Thanks!

2

Best way for someone like you to find out is to grab Unity Free and start hacking into it. Looking at the Mesh class in the documentation should get you started on the right foot.

There are no line segments in Unity’s mesh class, only vertices and a list of triangle indices, but that doesn’t stop you from writing your own custom mesh interface with vertex/edge/face support that can then output data that Unity can use for a mesh. I’ve been meaning to write an advanced mesh class myself but haven’t found the time yet.