“Imagine an AR sphere surrounding the ship, parented to it. You then make a set of GDScript global tool functions that draw stuff on that sphere – lines, chevrons, arcs, basically polylines with a width, with a bunch of math. It outputs a set of vertices and indices, ready for putting into an ArrayMesh.
You then make another set of functions in that GDScript file that transform and repeat lines, like repeat_arc or repeat_line, which takes vertices as previously constructed and then transforms it in another vector.
The final mesh is then baked into an ArrayMesh. Manual authoring does the rest – positioning, scaling adjustments. Then you bake nodes that rotate as a unit into several tscns, like compass rings, pitch ladders. Then you take the baked scenes, then rotate them along the proper axes, referencing the ship’s transform and state. Setting TopLevel=on or manually unrotating stuff is how I made them fixed.
The health/armor display at the bottom is just a bunch of hex prisms representing armor health. Armor grid and iteration through X, Y, Z, straightforward stuff.
The key here is to have a really good reference and art style you can key things off. I also did a ton of research on aircraft HUDs too. Or you can just model in Blender, but I wanted the math to be correct.”
