Making levels with planes vs. cubes

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1

Godot Version

Godot 4.4

Question

`I am modeling my 3D levels in Blender for a low-poly game, PS1 style.

The map uses a square grid to tile all the terrain using UV mapping, so some parts are jagged and bumpy. There might even be some 45º angles here and there.

For collisions, is it fine to use a flat plane as a base, or should I use a cube with thickness?

I could go with a plane and then add slopes and walls to it. In dungeons, it makes things simple to map out.

What I want to know is if having a mesh with no thickness could create problems in the future, especially when it comes to collisions. I’ve read that objects with thickness may be better, but I’ve mapped a few levels and no problems so far.

The game itself would be a simple platformer like Mario 64, for example.

Solution

After a few weeks, I’ve tried a bunch of things and planes are fine. They work perfectly with GridMap and as meshes. One thing to watch out for is face orientation in Blender. Turns out model faces have a front and back, and this can really mess collisions. I had a map with ceiling polygons inside out, so the player got stuck on the ceiling all the time.

Bonus points if you research backface culling for invisible front polygons, especially for maps with closed off areas.

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If you are using a trimesh/concave collision polygon shape it’s totally okay, there may be a front face and a back face, if you only anticipate colliding from above then you do not need to enable two-way collision.

If it’s a 100% flat plane then you could use a WorldBorder shape, if not a WorldBorder shape is still a good option for kill/respawn planes if a player happens to fall out of bounds.

3

Thanks for the input.

I am doing all the modeling in blender, then importing the meshes into Godot.

So far, it has been mostly fine, but I did run into a couple issues that are making me hesitate:

  • Sometimes, it appears I can see the sky box (WorldEnvironment with sky) peeking into gaps between polygons in the ground, mostly on pronounced slopes. Not sure why this happens, as I am only one month into 3D.

  • I did try using gridmap to create arches for dungeon hallways (a C-shaped tile with floor, wall and ceiling), but I had the player get stuck on the ceiling halfway through when jumping.

Using a Blender mesh on the ground has been mostly fine, though.

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A thin cube would be the best, for simplicty

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