I’ve been experimenting with a new Surface feature for my Asset Store product Mesh Shapes, and I’m looking for developers who are interested in trying it out and giving some feedback.
The goal with this change is to make it much easier for AI to generate simple graphics and shape-based artwork in perspective directly inside Unity.
The basic idea is that everything is still created from normal editable 2D shapes i.e. polygons, lines and beziers etc. but groups of shapes can sit on different surfaces such as the ground, front, side or roof just to keep some preset options everyone can relate to, but any values can be used for the surface orientation.
Those surfaces can then be viewed with perspective or otho, so you can change the POV, rotate surfaces, add depth to shapes and change how their front, top and side faces appear without turning the artwork into traditional 3D models. The only limitation is as its 2D art its using sorting values rather than depth sorting but we are working on a solution for that.
I’ve been getting reasonably good results with very little artistic direction. Basically I am asking AI to create small diorama-style scenes directly in Unity. That’s really just where I started experimenting with it though, it could potentially be used for much more than that for creation of art scenes in games with full editability in the engine scene.
The useful part is that the AI isn’t generating a flattened image. It’s building the scene from individual 2D Mesh Shapes and Surfaces, so everything remains editable afterwards. You can move objects around, change colours, modify individual shapes, adjust the perspective or change the POV without having to regenerate the artwork.
For me the main idea is to give AI a way to assist developers to develop games as a simple way to create graphics that have some spatial structure and perspective, while still keeping the workflow very lightweight and editable like 2D art which is easier for most people to create custom art for than 3D. Also by editting directly in Unity the process for testing is much faster.
Also the art is all mesh vector, you can texture shapes with sprites too among many other features within Mesh Shapes as standard.
It’s still experimental, so I’m mainly looking for people who would actually try using it and tell me what works, what doesn’t, and what would make the workflow more useful.
If this sounds interesting and you’d like to try it, please get in touch with me via a direct or private message here and I will arrange it for you.
I’d be really interested to see what other developers do with it and get some real-world feedback. Hopefully this idea makes sense and is interesting to other developers!!