PIMP – Procedural Iterative Mesh Processing Editor/ Tool

The purpose of the Procedural Iterative Mesh Processing Tool, better known as P. I. M. P., is to help facilitate the need for procedural collision mapping based on the comparative mesh. This tool will help by generating “mesh like” collisions but with significantly less polygons than Unity’s Mesh Collider and more accurate shapes than primitive collision types (i.e. cubes, cylinders, spheres, and etc.). Examples of similar tools can be found below:

These example images provided above are from Unreal Engine 4 and a demonstration on how the engine tries to map mesh collisions using reduced polygons procedurally. The engine provides an array of options to try to map the mesh to a more accurate representation of colliders, each index in this array of options provides a better and more closely mapped collision to the mesh, but at the expense of more polygons. However each option that is provided is more performant than just using all the polygons on the mesh, or mesh collider.

By abstracting away the tedious process of mapping colliders onto complex meshes, or really any mesh for that matter upon unity imports, we are able reduce time spent on such processes for any 3D Artist who would otherwise be tasked with it. Additional, the benefit in making such a tool is the added level of granularity we may achieve in regards to optimization. Things like spatial partitioning of the polygons and the need to reduce calculations on a per polygon basis, like for instance the heavy processing for mesh colliders, can all be additively handled within our application.

P. I. M. P. will help benefit Engineers and 3D Artists by easing the process of mapping colliders and to see significant boosts in frame rates and the general process of creating a complex meshes to using them in Unity. The hope as well is to help build an easier pipeline for 3D Models and generate many other tools or systems to help facilitate more complex collisions and what can expand on top of Unity’s collision engine.