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.

Casey Primozic

A walkthrough of a pipeline for converting text into 3D meshes using three main components: the JavaScript library svg-text-to-path (with Google Fonts support) to generate SVG paths, the Rust lyon crate to tessellate those paths into 2D triangle meshes, and a custom extrusion step to produce watertight 2-manifold 3D geometry. The backend runs as a minimal Bun HTTP service, while the tessellation and extrusion logic is compiled to WebAssembly. The resulting meshes support arbitrary fonts and scripts, are manifold/watertight, and can be used in CSG and other mesh processing operations.

Generating 3D Meshes From Text