Collider Shapes

An overview of all the supported Collision shapes of the Simple Collider addon. Simple Collider supports a wide variety of collision shapes and settings to create them.

Box Collider

Box colliders are simple, efficient, and cover a wide range of use-cases.

Gif showing the creation of a box collider Scene by Glenn Melenhorst

Sphere Collider

Sphere colliders are the most efficient Collision shape. Sphere collisions are usually represented by a mathematical description (location and radius) rather than polygons. The sphere meshes created by the addon are intended as a visual representation. Sphere collisions will become more expensive if they are imported as convex shapes or mesh shapes.

The sphere generation uses a fast algorithm that does not always provide the optimal result. This happens especially for simple box meshes. The results become better with more complex collisions. Improving or replacing the algorithm is planned for future releases.

Gif showing the creation of a sphere collider Scene by Glenn Melenhorst

Convex Collider

Convex shapes are versatile while being efficient. They can be used to represent most objects, especially for engines that don't support triangle mesh collisions

Gif showing the creation of a convex collider Scene by Glenn Melenhorst

Convex (Cylindrical) Collider

There is no special cylindrical collision shape. This is only a tool to help create a clean cylindrical convex shape. Cylindrical shapes are very common shapes, especially in manmade structures. Physics engines will interpret them as simple convex colliders.

Gif showing the creation of a cylindrical convex collider

Warning

Currently, only GLOBAL space is supported when using the entire selection (Creation Mode: SELECTION) for cylindrical collider generation. All other parameter combinations should work as expected.

Capsule Collider

Capsule colliders are a simple and efficient type to describe the collider of an object. Due to their efficiency they are often used to create the colliders of characters.

Mesh Collider

Mesh Collisions are the most complex collider shape to compute for a physics engine. Use them carefully, minimize the triangle count as much as possible and use them (only) for static objects.

Gif showing the creation of a mesh collider

Scene by Glenn Melenhorst

Re-Meshed Collider

Re-Meshed Colliders employ a voxelation process on the target mesh prior to generating the collider mesh. This proves advantageous when dealing with intricate objects composed of numerous intersecting parts, resulting in excessive and unnecessary geometry. By implementing this technique, interior faces are effectively eliminated. When coupled with decimation, this approach yields final collider meshes that are more efficient compared to conventional mesh colliders, which rely on the unaltered target mesh.

Gif showing the creation of a mesh collider Scene by Glenn Melenhorst 6

Oriented Minimum Box Collider

Oriented Minimum Box Colliders are automatically oriented boxes with the smallest size possible. The computation is more complex and may be slow for meshes with a high vertex count. The output mesh is the same as regular box colliders, and it's indistinguishable to the engine how it was created.

The implementation is based on Code from Iyad Ahmed. Iyad was so kind and gave me permission of using it.

Gif showing the creation of an oriented minimum box collider Scene by Glenn Melenhorst

Convert

You can convert any mesh to be a collider as well as any collider to be a regular mesh object.

Object to Collider

You can convert any mesh object to be a collider. The conversion applies the same properties as to other collisions created with the operators from above. The objects will be renamed, added to the collision collection, and can be hidden/selected as all the other colliders.

Gif showing the conversion of a mesh to a collider

Collider to Mesh

Collider to Mesh will remove all the collider-specific properties and materials. Convert to Mesh opens a pop-up window to set the new object name and to assign another material.

Gif showing the conversion of a collider to a mesh

Regenerate Name

Regenerate collider names based on preset. It works best when colliders created in version 1.1 or later. In older versions it will fall back to the default values of box collision and group 1 for the naming.

Gif showing the regeneration of a collider name

Collider from Naming

This operation assigns collider properties to objects based on their naming conventions. This proves valuable when dealing with assets not originally generated through this tool or when working with imported assets. Such an approach empowers you to leverage the complete functionality of the tools on these colliders.

Creation Overlay

This table contains all settings exposed to the user during the creation of a collider.

Key	Name	Inputs	Settings	Supported	Regenerate
Esc, RMB	Cancel		Cancel will abroad the current operation and remove the temporary colliders of this operation	All	No
Enter, LMB	Finish		Applies the current operation	All	No
P	Use Modifier Stack	Bool	If Use Modifier Stack is enabled, the collision will be generated based on the visible mesh, taking changes from the modifier stack into account.	All	Yes
C	Toggle X Ray	Bool	Transparent scene display. Allows selecting through items	All	Yes
O	Keep Original Materials	Bool	Use the original materials of the origin meshes instead replacing them with physics materials.	Mesh Re-Meshed Convert to Mesh	Yes
N	Keep Original Name	Bool	Use the name of the original object.	Convert to Mesh	Yes
G/L	Global/Local	Enum	Global: The object rotation is ignored and the collision is generated based on the world transformation of the vertices. The result will be the same as when appying the rotation of the object and calling the collision operator with Local Space. Local: The object rotation is taken into account.	Box, Cylinder	Yes
X/Y/Z	Cylinder Orientation	Enum		Cylinder	Yes
M	Creation Mode	Enum	INDIVIDUAL Generation per object SELECTION Generation around the entire selection. LOOSE-MESH Generation around mesh islands that are not connected to each other.	Cylinder	Yes
T	Collision Group	Enum	USER_01: USER_02: USER_03	All	No
Q	Collision Shape	Enum	BOX SPHERE CONVEX CAPSULE MESH The shapes are used for the naming.	Convert to	No
A	Alpha	Modal	Object Opacity	All	No
S	Shrink Inflate	Modal	Non-destructive shrink or inflate of the geometry based on the face normal. The operation uses the displace modifier and is therefore non-destructive and can be adjusted at a later point.	All	No
D	Decimate	Modal	Adds a decimate modifier to reduce the geometry density. The values go from 1 to 0, 1 means the object remains unchanged while 0 means it will be reduced to the minimum.	Convex Mesh Re-Meshed Convert V-hacd	Yes
R	Sphere resolution	Modal	Segments and Rings of the Sphere (Rings = Segments / 2)	Sphere	Yes
E	Cylinder Segments	Modal	The amount of segments used to describe the circular shape of the cylinder.	Cylinder	Yes
R	Capsule Segments	Modal	The amount of segments used to describe the circular shape of the capsule .	Capsule	Yes
R	Voxel Size	Modal	The voyel size for the remeshing of the collider .	Re-meshed	Yes
H	Height Multiplier	Modal	The height multiplier is used to adjust the capsule height manually.	Capsule	Yes
W	Width Multiplier	Modal	The amount of segments used to describe the circular shape of the capsule .	Capsule	Yes

Some settings, like shrink/inflate, use the mouse movement for changing the settings. The sensitivity and way how the mouse movement affects the settings can be adjusted by pressing manipulator keys like Ctrl, Shift, and Alt.

Key	Name	Description
Ctrl	Snap	Round value
Shift	Tweak	The mouse movement is more precise to allow for smaller changes.
Alt	Ignore	All input is ignored. You can move the mouse back to allow for bigger value changes.

Collider Display Settings

Display settings are now part of the preferences.

Name	Inputs	Settings
Hide After Creation	Bool	The collisions will be hidden after finishing the creation.
Display Wireframe	Enum	Off: There is no wireframe preview on the collision mesh Preview: The wireframes are only visible during the generation Always: The wireframes remain visible afterwards
Viewport Mode	Enum	OBJECT: Show Object Color MATERIAL: Show Material Color SINGLE: Show Single Color

Shape Creation

Simple Collider supports a wide variety of collision shapes and settings to create them. You can find all the details in the documentation. The collider creation works based on the selection, both for Object and Edit-mode. This also includes multi-object Edit-mode support.

An animation illustrating the collider creation based on edit and object mode selection Scene by Glenn Melenhorst

Generate collider based on the Object Mode selection.