I recently had a desire to convert text to 3D meshes that I could render and manipulate as part of my Geotoy project and Geoscript language. I did some research into tools and libraries that could solve different pieces of this, and I put together a pipeline that implements the whole thing - yielding nice, 2-manifold 3D meshes with arbitrary fonts, text styles, and more.
Unreal Engine Plugins That I Reckon Are Good
Mesh Tool by Nate Mary is a general modeling tool and the best way to do level design in the editor, though UE5’s CubeGrid tool is really good too (but has fewer functions than this). You can use both together, both just output meshes. I asked Nate to add Hotspot Texturing like Source 2 has, and the madman did it. The pictures above are all of MeshTool stuff, all of it whipped up real quick.
LangExtract
A Python library for extracting structured information from unstructured text using LLMs with precise source grounding and interactive visualization.
Creating fonts from SVGs – with automation! 🤖 · Leif Gehrmann
Lately I needed the ability to create a font from an existing set of SVG files that I created in Sketch. I’m not a professional font creator, but I’ve figured out an automated workflow works that works best for me.
Meet Datatype, my new font that turns text into charts. Available on Google Fonts and of course in Workspace. Simple syntax like {b:10,25,7,95} turns into sparklines, pie charts, and bar charts that look great in your docs, slides, and sheets. https://t.co/0cgEkOcFfM https://t.co/wViF3fPtMr
Meet Datatype, my new font that turns text into charts. Available on Google Fonts and of course in Workspace.Simple syntax like {b:10,25,7,95} turns into sparklines, pie charts, and bar charts that look great in your docs, slides, and sheets.https://t.co/0cgEkOcFfM pic.twitter.com/wViF3fPtMr— Frank Tisellano (@franktisellano) March 12, 2026
Wiretext — Unicode Wireframe Design Tool
A spatial design tool where everything renders as Unicode box-drawing characters. Share as text.
Three.js From Zero — Creative Web 3D for Artists · MasterAllArts
Learn Three.js as part of the MasterAllArts creative 3D roadmap: turn drawings, models, shaders, and portfolio ideas into interactive Web 3D scenes. Free articles with live demos.
Gallery | PolyCSS
Explore PolyCSS-rendered OBJ, glTF, GLB, VOX, textured, animated, and generated mesh examples in the DOM.
alan-turing-institute/ReadabiliPy
A simple HTML content extractor in Python. Can be run as a wrapper for Mozilla's Readability.js package or in pure-python mode.
WorldClaw: Agentic 3D Open-World Generation at Scale
From one open-ended prompt to an explicit, explorable, and editable 3D world.
Mesh Outlines Without Post-Processing in Unreal Engine
Some time ago I saw a neat solution by Cory Spooner on outlining meshes using particle sprites. The concept has been done before – but it’s interesting enough to cover it regardless for Unreal Engine...
Incremental Font Transfer Demo
This demonstrates the use of the incremental font transfer (IFT) to load font data for display of a variety of scripts. IFT works by using patches to extend a font to cover more codepoints and/or axes as they are encountered in rendered text. This allows loading of only the parts of a font that are actually needed. This demo is using a fully static (ie. no dynamic backend) version of IFT. IFT is currently in development with the w3c webfonts working group and an early draft of the specification implemented by this demo can be found here.
Text rendering and effects using GPU-computed distances
Text rendering is cursed. Anyone who has worked on text will tell you the same; whether it's about layout, bi-directional, shaping, Unicode, or the rendering itself, it's never a completely solved problem. In my personal case, I've been working on trying to render text in the context of a compositing engine for creative content. I needed crazy text effects, and I needed them to be reasonably fast, which implied working with the GPU as much as possible. The distance field was an obvious requirement because it unlocks anti-aliasing and the ability to make many great effects for basically free.
Really cool idea 🤯 - Install this web font - Just add plain text to the DOM - It renders a chart using font ligatures No JS, no hydration FOUC franktisellano.github.io/datatype/
