Pathways
Unity Engine
Throughout 2022 I explored Bezier splines, MIDI-driven animation, procedural mesh generation, and Unity’s C# Jobs system with compute buffers for GPU particle rendering.
V1 built tubes from bezier splines with the Mesh API. It worked, but got slow and buggy as complexity grew, and was cumbersome to use. Still, it established the visual language for later iterations and the MIDI-to-animation-curve system that carried through unchanged.
V2 moved mesh construction into the Jobs system — writing vertex/index buffers directly and offloading the spline math — which solved the performance problems, though the codebase was still difficult to build on top of.
Timeline based
All of the code runs in the editor, so there is no need to hit play! In addition, I designed everything to be scrub-able on a timeline, meaning everything is deterministic and pre-defined, and all animations are based on either procedurally created animation curves (using MIDI for timing) or deterministic mathematical functions. Why did I do this? My end goal here was to make a short film, and I wanted the ability to really dial in every shot by being able to pause and scrub all the visual content on the timeline.