Volumetric 3D for polylines

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Harry Harrison
  • updated
  • Under Consideration

I'd love to be able to draw pipes that bend in three dimensions and one gameobject using Polyline as an example.

Stems from - https://shapes.userecho.com/communities/1/topics/16-more-options-on-lines

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Freya Holmér creator
  • Under Consideration

3D polylines would generally also mean polyline joins in 3D, where there are a few complicating factors:

  • Some Polyline joins in 3D are much less trivial than 2D joins
    • Simple joins are easy enough
    • Miter joins are too, these two can use simple geometry since there's no extra geo in each cap
    • Bevel joins start complicating the geometry
    • Round joins complicate them even further
      • The issue here comes down to, well, both clutter for me writing the code, but also whether or not the amount of triangles for a join should change depending on angle
      • so far, the CPU does *no* calculations whatsoever in figuring out miter join stuff, but now, it has to, because if it's dynamic, it'd have to check angles on the fly, and update the geometry
  • 3D polylines means a little more than an order of magnitude more expensive to generate, but, this shooould be fine. I hope
  • End caps in 3D are more complicated than the 2D case, but, still doable


Right now, I don't know yet if I'll add this, it'll take some time to implement, and right now you can get very far with billboarded polylines, or, simply chained-together 3D lines with round caps