Technical Artist Recreated Lattice Modifier In Unity

Common in 3D modeling software like Blender or Maya to apply broad changes to one or more meshes, the lattice modifier lets you distort space and objects within it. It can also be pretty useful to create dynamic animations without using advanced rigs or custom vertex shaders.

Technical Artist Harry Heath decided to recreate a lattice modifier for Unity, utilizing a compute shader that transforms a mesh's vertex buffer. It samples a lattice (a 3-dimensional array of Vector3 offsets) for each vertex using tricubic sampling and then adds the interpolated offset.

As for performance, the developer said it's similar to GPU skinning. A test with 64 of these cars getting squashed takes about 5 ms on the GPU (2M vertices) and just one takes about 0.04 ms.

Stay updated on the development progress by following Harry Heath on X/Twitter, and check out his other Unity art:

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