| Example of using Dynamic 3D Text, direct capture from Unity Engine |
It was roughly 2 years ago when I added the first version of my latest asset to the Unity asset store:
Dynamic 3D Text.
All of my Unity assets fill some kind of gap in what the engine itself offers. Or, at least, filled such a gap at the time of the original release of the asset.
This holds especially true for Dynamic 3D Text. There is no support for runtime-generated 3D text in the engine itself. And when I started building this asset, there was exactly one such asset available in the Asset Store itself, with development having already been abandoned some years earlier, and that particular asset not working properly on the most recent versions of Unity.
Consider how games, for example, often contain a lot of artistic logos or menu titles as textures. Beautiful text, lit and then rendered in some content creation tool. Then comes the time for localization to several languages. In the end, you have likely tens of megabytes of such texture data in the project. At the same time you’re sweating over the size, as it’s still very much a thing to minimize download sizes, at least for mobile apps. Imagine leaving out all those textures and variants, and adding just a couple of TrueType/OpenType font files. Change text content dynamically in the app itself, as well as the text setup with the lighting and everything, and create beautiful text in runtime, rendered and animated in real time. File size of the final build goes down, and the game itself looks better than ever. That’s just one example of what using and switching to this asset can bring you.
The reason I’m writing about this on my blog only now, after two years, is that the asset is finally somewhat ready for prime time. Not so much as a “public beta”. I recently updated it, thinking about calling it 1.0.0 now that the crucial features were finished, such as word wrapping (even with soft hyphen support), many language-specific tweaks for better glyph shaping and ordering, better smooth normals, detaching as simple meshes, carefully tweaked custom inspector that makes it feel just like a native part of Unity, proper Prefab support, support for RTL languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, CJK support, optimization of the generation to make it multiple times faster than the original reference code and proof of concept, and even more… of course, including the core feature of dynamically creating geometric text with depth and support for beveling. Naturally, I have many ideas in the roadmap for awesome features. What’s lacking are proper in-depth marketing videos, images and information to show all the facets of Dynamic 3D Text [pun intended].
The asset itself is built in a “traditional” software engineering way. However, I recently used AI to create a separate test suite for it, as well as hunt down a few hard to track bugs. That has considerably enhanced its robustness and proved useful. Using AI made me think that the asset should be equally easy to use in agentic development. That made me realize that the programmatic API probably needs a few small tweaks or changes to properly enable that. And that’s only reason why I actually didn’t release the latest version as 1.0.0 but instead declared it to be 0.9.5.
Other than that, the asset is now remarkably better than the initial release (just check the Version History at bottom of the asset home page). So far, I’ve also raised the price with every update of the asset, and for now, the intention is to keep doing that, at least up to the forthcoming 1.0.0 release.
And now, if you’re reading this at the right moment, there’s a unique opportunity. The asset is going to be in a Flash Sale starting very soon now. I’m not planning to put it on sale very often, so if you have been holding off buying it, now is an excellent time to grab it at a considerable discount.