Hexasphere Grid System

Hexasphere Grid System is a high performance spherical grid system.

It leverages texture arrays and geometry shaders to provide optimal generation and runtime performance allowing hundreds of thousands of tiles.

Features

- Wireframe, Shaded and combined styles (shaded + wireframe).

- Bevel effect.

- Per tile color and texture.

- Extrusion with customizable height and gradient colors.

- Interactive: highlight tiles with cursor, drag/rotate and zoom sphere, fly to a given tile.

- Fast and easy to use path-finding functions to get the optimal path between any two tiles.

- Group cells to define different type of surfaces for path-finding purposes.

- Smart Edges options hides edges on adjacent tiles with same material.

- HeightMap texture support with option to use a separated water mask. Earth and water mask textures provided.

- Option to load a texture and map colors to tiles around sphere in one function call

- Inverted mode option. Renders the hexasphere inwards, placing camera at the center!

- VR compatible (multi-pass). Support for Google VR and Samsung Gear VR controllers.

- Easy to use API (C#) to change individual tile properties, get neighbours, shortest paths, ...

- Full source code included (C#).

- Demo scene included.

Requirements:

- Built-in and URP (Universal Rendering Pipeline) support.

- Works with SM 2.0 with basic features on all platforms.

- Texture arrays requires SM 3.5+

- Extrusion uses geometry shaders (SM 4.0+) compatible with OpenGL & DirectX (not supported on Metal).

Hexasphere Grid System produces perfectly regular geodesic grids which by definition contains 12 pentagons. They are fully functional, can be colored/textured/extruded and be used in path-finding methods as the rest of hexagons. In addition, the grid can be shifted so pentagons don't appear over undesired positions.