This article is the sequel to our series on the making of H – Immersion. You can read the first and the second parts here: A dive into the makin

Procedural 3D mesh generation in a 64kB intro

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2023-03-21 23:00:05

This article is the sequel to our series on the making of H – Immersion. You can read the first and the second parts here: A dive into the making of Immersion ; Texturing a 64kB intro.

In the previous part, we saw how textures are generated in H – Immersion. This time, we’ll have a look at another important tool for size coding: procedural geometry.

More specifically, since our rendering uses traditional polygons, we wrote a procedural mesh generator. We’ll see how with a few well chosen techniques, it is possible to create a variety of shapes, or make a viewer believe we did.

When we started making demos, the 64kB limit felt intimidating. We didn’t know anything about procedural mesh generation, and we already had a lot to do with the rendering, the camera, the textures, the story… well, with everything. So in our first demo, B – Incubation, we took the early decision to skip 3D modeling altogether. Instead, we chose to use only cubes and designed the demo around this concept.

This is an example of how a technical constraint can become a creative challenge, and force us to look for new ideas and do something unexpected. In all of our 64kB intros, the size limitation affects the design, sometimes in small and unexpected ways: we are constantly looking for tricks, code reuse, and workarounds to evade this barrier.