Simple Collider

by Matthias Patscheider in Addons


What is Collider Tools?

Simple Collider makes creating physics colliders for games fast and straightforward. It supports common collider types like Box, Sphere, Capsule, Convex, and Mesh as well as complex operations like Auto Convex decomposition and Oriented Bound Box generation. Simple Collider is made to work with game engines like UE, Unity, and Godot.

The addon’s simple user experience and UI lets you adjust colliders directly in the 3D Viewport, making it easy to see and control what you're doing. You can create colliders in Object or Edit-mode, for entire selections or specific parts of a mesh. Plus, you can choose to work with pre- or post-modifier mesh data, giving you the flexibility and speed you need.

Feature Overview

  • Quick and simple creation of collider objects.
  • Support for Sphere, Box, Capsule, Convex, Convex Cylinder, Re-Meshed and Mesh shapes.
  • Support for Oriented Minimum Bounding Box generation, an automatically oriented box collider to have the lowest volume possible.
  • Auto convex decomposition for complex shapes using the V-HACD library.
  • Support for Object- and Edit-mode, including multi-object Edit-mode.
  • Define creation space: Choose between generating colliders in Local or Global Space.
  • Create colliders per individual object, around the entire selection, or based on loose parts.
  • Custom colliders can be used in engines like UE4-5, Unity, Godot, and other engines with a flexible naming scheme.
  • Support for Edit mode selection. Create collision only surrounding the selected geometry of each object, with multi-edit and modifier stack support.
  • Support for creating world-aligned and object-aligned collisions for primitive collider types like Boxes, Cylinders, and Capsules.
  • Create colliders based on pre or post-modifier stack mesh data.
  • Adjust creation settings directly from the 3D Viewport, allowing for real-time user input during collider generation.
  • Flexible naming options to support different engine and pipeline needs.
  • Robust preset system: Select and switch between presets for different game engines, and easily exchange these presets.
  • Rename colliders based on the current preset.
  • Convert Mesh to Collider, Collider to Mesh, and generate colliders from a mesh name.
  • Collider organization: Manage visibility, selection, and deletion using collider groups.
  • Assign and organize materials for use as physics materials in engines.

Why Simple Collider?

Simple Collider removes the biggest obstacle to creating colliders in Blender—its lack of specialized tools. This addon makes the process much faster and easier, combining the speed and convenience of in-engine tools with the power and flexibility of Blender.

Here’s why Simple Collider stands out:

  • More control: Create colliders in Blender with full control over shape, size and complexity - useful for all kind of assets.
  • Faster compound colliders: Generate multiple colliders for one asset quickly using Object and Edit-mode selections.
  • Engine compatibility: Not all engines have powerful collider tools—Simple Collider fills that gap.
  • Convenience: Handle assets and colliders in one application, updating both as needed.

Testimonials

What other artists from the games industry say about collider tools:

Portrait image of Richard Court Richard Court - Senior Environment Artist | Studio Gobo

This addon is a must-have. It takes all the hassle and tedious work out of creating custom collision. So fast and easy to use, and it even takes care of naming and parenting with support for custom prefixes.

Portrait image of Jeremy Estrellado Jeremiah Estrellado / Lead Environment Artist / Founder of The Dinusty Empire

This is something that a lot of people overlook on how much time it can take up on a project. With its intuitive interface and support for complex shapes, it’s impressive how quickly you can get usable results.

Portrait image of Michael Kinsey Michael Kinsey - Tech Artist | Counterplay

I am a huge fan of addons that reduce the steps and amount of clicks it takes me to do menial tasks. This addon is one of those. Its simple and clean and will save a lot of time for anyone making collision meshes in Blender for use in game engines like Unreal Engine. I wish I had this addon a lot sooner!

Portrait image of Jérémy Cerisy Jérémy Cerisy - Environment Artist | Remedy Entertainment

 have been lucky enough to be able to try Collider Tools in the past months and I can tell you that it became directly one of my favorite and most used add-ons. Everything is just so simple and powerful. Now I can create collisions in a matter of seconds for any assets or modular kit and spend all this extra saved time on more creative and fulfilling tasks!

Portrait image of Arthur Chamerois Arthur Chamerois - 3D Artist | Bulwark Studios

Making collisions is often the most annoying part of the art pipeline. I think anyone working in real-time 3D deserves to get through this moment the proper way. That's what this addon allows.😃

Banner for 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

Gif showing the creation of a cylindrical convex collider

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

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

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 S
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.

Mesh 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.

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.

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 conversion of a mesh to a collider Gif showing the conversion of a collider to a mesh Gif showing the regeneration of a collider name

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 per object.

An animation illustrating the collider creation based on edit and object mode selection

Scene by Glenn Melenhorst

Generate collider based on the Edit Mode selection.

An a nimation illustrating the collider creation based on edit and object mode selection

Scene by Carlo Bergonzini

Colliders can be generated per object or around the entire selection - both in object mode and multi object edit mode.

Auto Convex Shape

Auto Convex is a helpful tool for generating convex colliders of a complex mesh. It works well for complex, organic shapes, like rocks, statues, rubble and debris. It is not the magic one click solution for each asset but a helpful tool especially for organic assets!

Example of Auto Convex Collider generation and how different depth settings affect the number of created colliders.

Scene by Glenn Melenhorst


The Simple Collider addon covers only the blender side of creating collisions. It does not provide any special importers for 3rd party game engines.

Naming Presets

Simple Collider supports naming presets saved as simple .py files on the file system. You can save naming settings, quickly toggle them if for working on different projects or engines and share the preset files with colleagues. Simple Collider 1.1 bring a lot of improvements to the prefab handling. It's shipped with different presets:

  • UE-default (read-only)
  • Unity (read-only)

img

Presets can be created and deleted. You can change a preset by creating a preset with the same name. img

UE4 and UE5 support the import of Simple and partially Complex collisions.

img Supported Simple Collision shapes imported to UE4 and UE5.

The collider import and setup in Unity is very simple. The following documentation is a guide on how to get the collisions from Blender to Unity. It will also reference the well-written Unity documentation, for more information on the Physics system in Unity and how the colliders are used by it.

img

Choose a product version:

  • $30 Single User License

  • $170 Studio License (up to 10 Users)

  • $300 Studio License (10+ Users)

Sales 300+
Customer Ratings 4
Average Rating
Dev Fund Contributor
Published over 2 years ago
Blender Version 4.1, 4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3, 3.2, 3.1, 3.0, 2.93, 2.92
License GPL
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