Rendering Gears

[daring ingot]

I'm working on a game that involves building and simulating complex mechanisms out of gears from a mostly top down view. I'm fairly new to to 3D rendering pipelines and such.

1. I will need a lot of different sizes and angles for gears, especially beveled ones. Should I generate them as 3d meshes, normal maps, or a combination of the two?
2. It would be really cool to be able to render everything in a way that looks a bit like a diagram or blueprint. Do you have any tips on where I could find resources for that sort of thing, keywords to look for, or ideas to experiment with?
   I've included an example images for aesthetic inspiration.

[warm flume]

No opinions for 1., but for 2. you'll need an orthographic projection and some edge detection to have that plan feel

Here's my crate that implements edge detection as a post process effect https://github.com/IceSentry/bevy_mod_edge_detection

[daring ingot]

Yeah, I set up orthographic (and plan to try to tilt my non-flat gears to make them stand out a bit, but edge detection will help a lot.

[warm flume]

Oh also, I'd recommend sticking with very basic shading, like just use flat colors

[ornate tapir]

I will need a lot of different sizes and angles for gears, especially beveled ones. Should I generate them as 3d meshes, normal maps, or a combination of the two?
you will have to generate meshes

normal mapping will not produce a satisfactory effect

if your gears can all be described as a set of concentric components (hole with keyway, flat area, teeth) then it shouldn't be too complex to code that as a sort of stitched together set of cylinder meshes

mesh generation of this sort is fiddly but not hard, in the sense that you don't have to implement any tricky algorithms

[daring ingot]

Ok, thanks, thats good to know

[ornate tapir]

the kind of situation that would be hard is if you want to display shapes that are cut out of other shapes, which takes you into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_solid_geometry

but if you don't want "punch a hole in this gear at an arbitrary location" and just "the center is either a Hole or a Shaft" then you can code that as a specific case

it's all cylinders/cones, except for the teeth which are a cylinder or cone that's made extra wavy

and so you just generate triangles for each component and each connection between components, and they will all be cylinders/cones/disks-with-holes

[daring ingot]

I might want to do something like that eventually, but I might just cheat that with textures or something, since it wont be a full cutout

[ornate tapir]

so you can write one routine that generates that ring-shape with parameters in polar coordinates, and then use it lots to make many kinds

[ornate tapir]

I would also suggest that you make a little 'playground' project to render gears, separate from your game / simulation, so you can tinker with the algorithm efficiently

general principle of computer graphics code / procedural art: fast iteration makes it a lot easier and more fun to work on

[daring ingot]

My game currently is kinda a playground already (I haven't gotten that far), but sure, thats probably a good idea

that way I can tweak it later separately too

The hope is that after I get all the bits to make a simulation of a naval mechanical fire control computer and mechanical watch, there will be something in there I can find to make an actually fun game out of it 😛