Looking for a Spline solution with variable width

News & General Discussion
1

Hello everybody :slight_smile:

I’m looking for a spline solution where I can specify a width for each anchor, to be able to generate “roads” with variable widths. To my surprise, I’m having trouble to find an asset that provides such functionality.

I bought Dreamteck Splines almost a year ago, but it caused and is still causing so many different problems, that I’m longer willing to waste my time with this asset and search for a replacement.

I’m really just looking for a spline and mesh-generator, that’s all I need. I don’t want to pull in some sort of “uber package” that is doing so much more than just what I need. For example, some solutions come with their own visual scripting tools to create splines, I’m not looking for something like that.

If anybody knows a lightweight spline solution that supports variable widths, that would be perfect. Thanks in advance!

2

Not perfect solution but cant you have one spline for the path and a curve for the width?

edit: missed that it should generate mesh too. I think you need go for frameworks like Easy road for that. Even easy road have problems. though. UV is messed up if roads of different width are connected

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3

Thanks for the reply!

I actually bought Easy Roads about one year ago as well, when I was doing my research how to best create paths. Easy Roads was extremely bugged for me, where Undo/Redo stopped working and the tool suddenly spit out errors for no apparent reason. It’s also doing so much more than what I need and my experience with these big solutions is that they do “everything” but nothing of it really well.

That’s why I’m looking for a lightweight solution that just creates a spline and mesh, hoping that at least this works then.

I don’t need UV’s in the generated mesh, I just need the geometry. The generated mesh/racetrack serves as a placeholder that gets remodeled by an actual artist and to generate a NavMesh from it.

4

if its just a placeholder then maybe a spline + curve would do and then manually create the mesh from code?

edit: and yeah, easy roads was pretty bugged for me too (easy roads v3)

5

What do you mean with “spline + curve”? Specifically, what’s the curve you’re referring to?

6

Just a normal curve on one axis the position on the spline the other the width of the road at this point.

7

Thanks again for the reply!

I read your reply like a hundred times , but I’m not getting it. Let’s assume I use Path Creator to create a spline and generate a mesh from that. What is the “curve” you’re referring to? Is it some sort of additional asset or component?

8

No worries :slight_smile:

Pick any point on the spline let’s say it’s 20 meters from the start of the spline. Look up the width at this point in an additional curve. X=20 y=8 the road is 8 meter wide at this point

9

I’m still completely lost what the “additional curve” is. :sweat_smile:

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10

Just a standard unity curve for example?

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11

What about this asset? It lets you define additional data in the spline

12

Thanks, that clears things up, which allows me to answer to your previous reply:

If these are two things, I imagine they’re often not in sync. For example, if I modify the spline and it changes the spline-length, it would cause the width to be still at X=20, but perhaps I moved this segment to a different position.

Other than that, the idea sounds pretty good. Perhaps I can add this to Path-Creator as a test.

The asset was updated in 2013 the last time, not sure if it still works with recent Unity versions.

13

Yeah you need to create custom editor tooling so they stay in sync.

14

I use MegaShapes, does everything you are wanting, its based on the Spline and lofting system in 3ds max but with a lot of extra bits, use it at some point in all my projects. Last update was a day ago.

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15

Thank you! I’ve posted a couple of questions and I couldn’t find in the documentation in the MegaShapes [thread]( https://discussions.unity.com/t/465367 page-3#post-6443957).