Mesh Generation

Research
My first step doing this project was to try and find examples on how other people had solved this same problem. I watched a number of videos from GDC especially one from the developers of Rainbow Six Siege which is a game filled with wall destruction. They used full mesh destruction and since this was my first project working with mesh generation I felt like it was outside of my scope.

​

Concept

I decided to instead come up with a simple custom solution that fit my scope and allowed me to get a visually satisfying result. We had just had a shader course so I felt confident that I could write a shader where you could paint transparency on a texture. If I got that to work I only had to generate a loop of circles around the inside of the hole.

 

Texture Hole Painting

To make the Shader for the texture I followed a tutorial that taught you to make a simple canvas application and then I adapted that into paining transparency holes on a texture instead. I can also print holes of different shapes with this shader by using a hole texture.
 

Generating the Mesh
Generating the mesh takes part in 4 steps:

Step 1:

Draw out X amount of points in a circle around the center of each

hole where X is decided with a resolution variable and the distance from the center is controlled by a radius variable. 

​

Step 2:

remove all points that are overlapping another hole. and mark each point that has a removed  neighbour point as an endpoint, visualized as green points on the pictures.

​

Step 3:

Connect each all points so that you get a border of the bullet hole and connected bullet holes.

Step 4: 
Extrude that border into a mesh.

Potential Improvements

One potential Improvement I could Implement is to use a circle Intersection algorithm and draw a point at the intersection and connection this would be more reliable than my current method but would not get the semi rounded corners I currently get for free.