Working with Volumetric Meshes in a Game Engine: a Unity Prototype

Abstract

Volumetric meshes are useful assets in many different research and application fields, like physical simulations, FEM or IGA. In the last decade, the Computer Graphics community dedicated a lot of effort in studying and developing new algorithms for the creation, manipulation, and visualization of this family of meshes. In the meantime, Game Development became a relevant field of application for CG practitioners entangled with AR and VR techniques. In this work, we position ourselves at the confluence of these two broad research and development paths. We introduce a custom data structure aiming at using volumetric meshes in Unity. To this purpose, we combine gaming techniques and interactions with typical operations of volumetric meshes. Besides this, to make the researcher experience more realistic, we also introduce features to manipulate volumetric meshes for their projects in an immersive environment using VR techniques. We think this feature can be useful in developing tools for 3D Sculpting or Digital Fabrication.