Got the Spline Tool basically working to create a river system for my map generator. A few additions to the tool would make things work even better:
Spline Merging/Branching. Need a way to have Spline Components with multiple branches. I can drop splines on top of each other, but the overlapping meshes have lots of visual artifacts and don’t necessarily fit properly. It would be better in general if the Splines worked in a coherent branching fashion anyway.
Spline Mesh World Points. Using multiple meshes leads to tiling which is very obvious, especially with water textures. Would be great if we had a third option that combined the Spline Mesh Component with the Spline Component so that we could tinker with the tangents at multiple points along a single Spline Mesh instead of only Start and End.
Spline Instancing. Need an InstancedSplineMeshComponent to reduce draw calls. Preferably one that works with the above features.
the only way i can think of to ‘merge’ meshes in this way is we use the spline to create a signed distance field and voxelise it to create a mesh using an iso surface. the geo would be very clean though.
A way to extrude a shape along a spline would be very useful. If we had a loft feature, we could place the cross section spline of our shape along the path spline and loft to create our surface. This is what houdini engine is going to be really useful for. Shame its $499 for just the engine. houdini itself it even more expensive.
haven’t thought much about this. could be good for things that require a lot of detail.