Spline mesh extrusion

I’d love a feature to be able to extrude a given mesh (or something like that) along a given spline.

This can be used to construct smooth pipes, roads, guardrails, tracks, cables and quite some other “curvy” things.

Advantages of such a feature over, for example, manually triangulating a mesh using wedgeparts;

  • Proper smooth shading of the curve
  • Pretty confident this will yield much better performance
  • Much easier to manipulate
  • Automatic, seamless proper UV mapping from the base UV map?
  • Auto-LOD generation?
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I know i keep saying this over and over again but i really want vertex deformation for this and many other reasons.

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You cannot properly achieve this using just mesh deformation (nor the other way around). (both features would be awesome though)

Though in my understanding, extruding a mesh along a boolean curve/spline could be considered deformation, right?

I agree that they are both deformation, but I would definitely not classify them as the same thing.

Extrusion would dynamically generate geometry from a base mesh (along a spline), thus basically constructing a new mesh. With mesh deformation, especially how it’s usually used (animating rigged characters), the geometry only deforms (positions and maybe normals change) and things like the UV coord for each vertex stays the same.

Ohhh, so you’re not planning on having the splines animate-able? I was thinking about stick figures and such. :stuck_out_tongue:

They could be animate-able (probably not in my (and many other) cases though).

Maybe they can be generalized to a single thing with some parameters, I’m unsure, up to Roblox to figure that out :stuck_out_tongue: . In my mind they seem completely different, though.

This is an example of how mesh extrusion along a spline is frequently used:

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