Hey developers, good job with the release of the preview build 3. I’ve been playing with it a bit and opened one of the tilemap examples. And you know what I thought?
“I wonder how hard would it be to integrate shadows into this”. This task would be quite easy in 3D. This raises the question of whether it is possible to use the tiling and brushes system to create any game object. This removes a lot of limitations that sprites impose like no shadows, particle systems, etc…
The whole idea of brushes and tiling seems like it would fit as tools for general level design rather than just for 2D.
Full 3D tilemap workflows is something that is not our focus in the first release, but a future thing. Already all the APIs and internals are in 3D coordinates to prepare for this.
In the first release, the brush system is locked into Z=0, but with some hacks you could make a brush that paints on other Z-values too. By feeding tilemap with GameObject’s, you can also make it render 3D mesh, but the performance will not be great.
In our previous Hackweek, we already built a internal prototype of how the tilemap 3D could work. Here is a video:
This is a necro, but - does Unity have any plans on updating this and making official 3D tilemap support? There aren’t many solutions for 3D tilemaps on the asset store or in the forum.
