Assets [WIP] Wire Builder - Easy to use wire creation

Started working on this tool a few months ago, to create utility poles for a rural town environment. I doubled down on UX, to make it easy to use for other artists. Though simply dragging, utility poles can be placed, or wires can be pulled from a connector to other connectors.

It is almost ready for the asset store, but still needs documentation, screenshots, example assets and a polishing pass.

How its designed
An editor tool to create suspended electricity or telephone wires. Built around an intuitive "click & drag" scene-view editor.

Connectors can be added to GameObjects (eg. utility poles) to form a group. In turn, wires can be connected between connectors.

Features:
• Animated wire shader
• Preset-based wire type settings
• Per-wire adjustable sagging
• Adjustable wire resolution per meter
• LineRenderer or MeshRenderer wire generation
• Compatible with 2D view
• Vegetation Studio tree removal underneath wires

Notes:
• Wires have a centered pivot so will work with World Streamer or other grid systems
• Tag and Layer can be set for generated wires • Includes Amplify Shader Editor and Shader Graph functions for the animation effect.

Limitations:
• Wires have no collision
• No editing can be done at runtime, this is an editor-only tool

 

While writing the documentation it occurred to me some things were not as obvious or straightforward as I had thought. This lead to some major design changes.

I ditched the concept of a "network" which dictated the appearance of the wires and prefabs used. Instead, any prefab with connectors attached can now be freely placed anywhere, duplicated, and have wires dragged from it. To summarize:

• Connectors can now each have a different wire type. For example, utility poles can have both power lines and telegraph wires.
• Vegetation Studio tree masking is toggled per wire type. Previously only across an entire network
• Connectors no longer need to be part of a cluster (now renamed to "group"). This is more straightforward for objects that only have a single connection point.
• Wires can now be connected between any connector, rather that just the ones belonging to the same network.
• Now works in 2D-mode as well

Reworking all the UI as well:


Any interaction with the wires or connectors will now show context-sensitive instructions:

 

I think I saw this on Twitter or something... This seems like a really amazing tool!

 

Implemented undo functionality and made some UI improvements. The instructions labels can now also be turned off. Wire types can now be switched on the fly for any connector as well.

Will include a variant of the animated wire shader for LWRP/URP as well. The animation functionality is available as an ASE shader function or Shader Graph sub-graph, so it can be used in custom wire shaders.