3d ground for 2d gameplay / side scroller

[anon94818156]

Hi. I am new to Unity and have a question on the best way to do this. I plan on building a long thin mesh in blender to act as my ground and then scroll along this for some 2d game play.

From what I can tell the best way for me to detect a collision with this mesh is to add a Mesh Collider to it and then use Physics.RayCast to test for a collision. (please let me know if there is a better approach).

My question is, if I create a big mesh like this will Unity optimize the data well enough that I do not have to worry about breaking up the mesh into smaller meshes to handle the collision lookups which will occur several times every frame or do I need to try and limit the size of each mesh so that it can cull out the objects faster before it does any triangle level collision detection?

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks.

[aldonaletto]

You should use the mesh collider, but there’s no need to Raycast: if you use a CharacterController in your character, it will automatically detect ground collisions and walk over your mesh collider without falling through.

About the mesh, it’s a good idea to break it in smaller pieces and import each one as a separated object - you can have better texture resolution, and segments out of the viewing volume will not be rendered, improving performance (Unity does frustum culling automatically). Segments a little larger than the screen seem to be a good choice, since at most two mesh segments will be rendered each frame.