Keen Vectors imports SVG shapes and renders them efficiently at runtime. Available now on the Asset Store!
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Tell me more!
Vector graphics are great: they are future proof since they scale to larger resolutions, and customizable since they represent artistic intent better than a grid of pixels. What they are not, however, is trivial to render at runtime.
Sometimes you settle to authoring in vectors, and importing them as bitmaps in the engine. That is cool, and tools for doing that already exist, but supporting more resolutions means shipping larger bitmaps, and requires shipping updates if you want to support even larger display densities.
What if instead, you could have something that is almost as cheap to render as a bitmap, while still benefiting from runtime coloring and scalability?
Keen Vectors will import your SVG files into a representation that is cheap to render, while retaining many benefits of vector graphics:
- Apply effects like outlines and drop shadows at runtime;
- Texture size scales with shape complexity, not output resolution;
- Confidently scale your art up and down retaining accurate contours, including sharp corners.
As well as integrating very well with Unity itself. Since it still produces textures, you can use vectors anywhere a Sprite is expected, as long as you use a material with a compatible shader!
There is comprehensive tech art documentation in the manual, so feel free to mosey around if you want the details!
SVGs are pretty complicated, how does it size up?
At this point in time, only shape contours are imported. This means that features like gradients, fill colors, stroke styles, images, and filters are not supported.
To be more specific, all shapes (paths, rectangles, circles, ellipses) will be converted to paths with no stroke or fill information, then rendered as a distance field that can be rendered at runtime.
Styles and groups that affect transforms will be respected, so will symbols and uses.
In practical terms, this means that Keen Vectors is best used for flat vector art, procedural materials, or composite sprites.
Why is it in beta?
- SVGs are pretty complicated, I’ve done my best, but I am sure there are many edge cases that need fixing still. Nothing better than people rightfully yelling at me to find and fix them!
- This is my first time publishing in the Asset Store, so I still gotta get a grip on how this whole marketing and support thing works;
- The current feature set works great for my personal use case, but I think there are still some things that could be worked on to make this more valuable to others, like importing basic strokes and fills.
With that in mind, I offer the asset at a discount to anyone purchasing it during the beta, to be fair to you, and hopefully to bring in some people that would be on the fence about it.
Alright, I’m in.
Keen Vectors is available now on the Asset Store, with a nice launch discount in addition to the beta pricing, grab it while it’s hot!