Procedural Spline Tool

Summary

The Procedural Spline Tool is an editor extension designed to streamline the creation of winding roads, rail tracks, cables, tunnels, and organic environmental paths.

Built to replace repetitive manual asset snapping, it allows level designers and environment artists to shape continuous 3D paths in the viewport while generating optimized, UV-mapped geometry and seamless collision meshes in real time.

Responsibilities

• Rotation Minimizing Frames (RMF): Implemented Wang et al.’s Double Reflection method to propagate continuous coordinate frames along 3D curves, eliminating the gimbal lock and 180-degree twist singularities inherent to traditional Frenet-Serret frames.
• Arc-Length Parameterization: Built a discrete cumulative distance lookup table (LUT) with binary search interpolation, ensuring consistent UV texture coordinate mapping and vertex spacing regardless of curve tightness.
• Dynamic Mesh & Collision Generation: Designed real-time procedural index buffer synthesis, vertex normal computation, and asynchronous physics collider generation.
• Non-Destructive Static Baking: Engineered a one-click baking utility that strips editor overhead, removes interior hidden faces, and produces optimized static scene prefabs for release builds.

Current Status & Reception

• Production Workflow Impact: Reduced environment pathway authoring times down to approximately 15% of previous manual placement time, completely eliminating visible mesh seams and collision catches.
• Developer Reception: Demonstrated publicly with good reception from indie technical artists and level designers seeking lightweight, in-engine procedural path tools.