How to create large spherical hexagonal grids in Unity

In this article we would like to introduce our Asset — “Hexasphere Grid System”, for Unity, ideal to create games based on spherical grid system.

This asset leverages texture arrays and geometry shaders to provide optimal generation and runtime performance allowing hundreds of thousands of tiles.

When you import the package, a new folder named “Hexasphere” will be generated in the project manager, which includes several Demos which showcase what kind of results you can achieve, a Documentation folder with the main settings and explanation of the script integration, and finally the rest of folders containing the necessary resources of the Asset.

Creating a sphere from scratch is very easy, you just have to go to Unity’s main menu, and select GameObject — 3D Object — Hexasphere, and a new sphere based on the grid system will be created. From this point you can start editing the different options related to the sphere behavior and appearance.

In the inspector panel, you can edit options and values related to general settings, interaction with the sphere and the sphere itself with environment, set pathfinding configuration, and make use of utilities that will help you take the most out of the Asset. These options allow you to choose the number of tiles that you would like your sphere to have, set alpha amount of the sphere, change its color and choose how shadows will interact with it. You can also set sphere rotation, highlight and zoom values which will make it easy for the developer to give an outstanding look to users.

Hexasphere Grid System produces perfectly regular geodesic grids which by definition contains 12 pentagons. They are fully functional, can be colored/textured/extruded and be used in path-finding methods as the rest of hexagons. In addition, the grid can be shifted so pentagons don’t appear over undesired positions.

Furthermore, the utility options will make it easy for you to export the mesh if you would like to give it a particular use, and also customize a specific tile thanks to the Grid Editor, ideal to give different options and appearance to specific tiles and make their behavior different from the rest of the tiles composing the sphere.

To get in depth explanation of our Asset, watch the video below. For more information about Hexasphere Grid System and our Assets, you can contact us or visit our Official Youtube Channel.