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Procedural Mesh Geometry / Anatomy of a Mesh

Anatomy of a Mesh
A mesh consists of triangles arranged in 3D space to create the
impression of a solid object. A triangle is defined by its three corner
points or vertices. In the Mesh class, the vertices are all stored in a single
array and each triangle is specified using three integers that correspond
to indices of the vertex array. The triangles are also collected together
into a single array of integers; the integers are taken in groups of three
from the start of this array, so elements 0, 1 and 2 define the first
triangle, 3, 4 and 5 define the second, and so on. Any given vertex can
be reused in as many triangles as desired but there are reasons why
you may not want to do this, as explained below.

Lighting and Normals

The triangles are enough to define the basic shape of the object but
extra information is needed to display the mesh in most cases. To allow
the object to be shaded correctly for lighting, a normal vector must be
supplied for each vertex. A normal is a vector that points outward,
perpendicular to the mesh surface at the position of the vertex it is
associated with. During the shading calculation, each vertex normal is
compared with the direction of the incoming light, which is also a vector.
If the two vectors are perfectly aligned, then the surface is receiving
light head-on at that point and the full brightness of the light will be used
for shading. A light coming exactly side-on to the normal vector will give
no illumination to the surface at that position. Typically, the light will
arrive at an angle to the normal and so the shading will be somewhere in
between full brightness and complete darkness, depending on the angle.

Since the mesh is made up of triangles, it may seem that the normals at
corners will simply be perpendicular to the plane of their triangle.
However, normals are actually interpolated across the triangle to give
the surface direction of the intermediate positions between the corners.
If all three normals are pointing in the same direction then the triangle
will be uniformly lit all over. The effect of having separate triangles
uniformly shaded is that the edges will be very crisp and distinct. This is
exactly what is required for a model of a cube or other sharp-edged
solid but the interpolation of the normals can be used to create smooth
shading to approximate a curved surface.

To get crisp edges, it is necessary to double up vertices at each edge

since both of the two adjacent triangles will need their own separate
normals. For curved surfaces, vertices will usually be shared along edges
but a bit of intuition is often required to determine the best direction for
the shared normals. A normal might simply be the average of the
normals of the planes of the surrounding triangles. However, for an
object like a sphere, the normals should just be pointing directly
outward from the spheres centre.

By calling Mesh.RecalculateNormals, you can get Unity to work out the

normals directions for you by making some assumptions about the
meaning of the mesh geometry; it assumes that vertices shared
between triangles indicate a smooth surface while doubled-up vertices
indicate a crisp edge. While this is not a bad approximation in most
cases, RecalculateNormals will be tripped up by some texturing
situations where vertices must be doubled even though the surface is
smooth.

Texturing
In addition to the lighting, a model will also typically make use of
texturing to create fine detail on its surface. A texture is a bit like an
image printed on a stretchable sheet of rubber. For each mesh triangle,
a triangular area of the texture image is defined and that texture triangle
is stretched and pinned to fit the mesh triangle. To make this work,
each vertex needs to store the coordinates of the image position that
will be pinned to it. These coordinates are two dimensional and scaled to
the 0..1 range (0 means the bottom/left of the image and 1 means the
right/top). To avoid confusing these coordinates with the Cartesian
coordinates of the 3D world, they are referred to as U and V rather than
the more familiar X and Y, and so they are commonly called UV
coordinates.

Like normals, texture coordinates are unique to each vertex and so

there are situations where you need to double up vertices purely to get
different UV values across an edge. An obvious example is where two
adjacent triangles use discontinuous parts of the texture image (eyes
on a face texture, say). Also, most objects that are fully enclosed
volumes will need a seam where an area of texture wraps around and
joins together. The UV values at one side of the seam will be different
from those at the other side.

See Also
Using the Mesh Class page.
Mesh scripting class reference.

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