Unibuilder Manual

Getting started

Installation

1. Copy the addons/unibuilder/ folder from your purchase into your project's addons/ folder.
2. Open Project → Project Settings → Plugins and enable Unibuilder.
3. The Unibuilder toolbar appears above the 3D viewport. You're ready.

Requirements: Godot 4.7 or later, any platform. The plugin is pure GDScript, so the standard Godot build runs it. You don't need .NET or any native libraries.

Upgrading from the demo. Close the project in Godot, then copy the full version's addons/unibuilder/ folder over the demo's. It is the same folder with the same files, so nothing else changes: the plugin stays enabled, your scenes open exactly as you left them, and every mesh keeps its materials, collision, and editable shape parameters. The demo's limits and watermark are gone the next time the project opens.

Your first mesh

1. Open the  Add menu on the toolbar and pick  Cube.
2. Press and drag in the viewport to draw the base rectangle on the grid, release, then move the mouse to pull out the height.
3. Click to commit. The new object is selected and ready to edit, and drawing another shape chains straight on.

Press 4 to enter Face mode, click a face, then hold Shift and drag the move gizmo. That's an extrude, and it is the single gesture you will use most.

What a Unibuilder mesh is

Every Unibuilder object is a UBMeshInstance3D, which extends the ordinary MeshInstance3D. The editable model (n-gon faces, materials, UV settings, colors) lives in its mesh_data resource, and the plugin compiles it to a normal ArrayMesh whenever it changes. Because the compiled mesh is stored with the scene:

• the mesh renders, lightmaps, and occludes like any other mesh;
• scenes open and games run with the plugin disabled: the compiled mesh is saved in the scene, not rebuilt on load;
• exported games include collision, because the node script ships with the addon;
• duplicating a node (Ctrl+D, or copy and paste) gives the copy its own mesh data, so editing one never changes the other. The two share their materials, like any duplicated mesh does.

The grid and snapping

Unibuilder draws its own reference grid, independent of Godot's. One value drives both the visual density and the snap step, so what you see is what you snap to. The grid follows its toolbar toggle and nothing else; it doesn't wait for a mesh to be selected. Unibuilder saves the grid's state per project, never in your scenes.

Controls

Absolute snap

Normal snapping moves a selection in whole grid steps from wherever it started, so a vertex that sits 0.3 off the grid stays 0.3 off it however far you drag. Turn on Absolute Snap in the  Tools menu and a move lands the selection on the grid lines instead. Drag an axis arrow and only that axis snaps. Drag the center square and the selection lands on the nearest grid point. The selection still moves as one rigid block: its lowest corner is the point that lands on the grid, so a single vertex goes exactly onto a line and an edge or face keeps its size. It works the same way when you move a whole object. Along the grid plane's own axis the lines follow the plane's offset, so after Align Grid the selection lands on the grid you can see.

Per-element snap

By default a dragged selection snaps as one rigid block, keeping its shape. Turn on Per-Element Snap in the  Tools menu and each vertex quantizes to the grid individually instead. The shape may distort; that's the point. Use it to conform loose geometry to the grid.

Vertex snapping

Hold V during any move drag. When the cursor comes near another vertex, an amber ring and crosshair mark it, and the dragged selection jumps so its grabbed vertex lands exactly on the target, with no gap between them.

• The anchor is the dragged vertex nearest your cursor when the drag started, so grab the gizmo near the corner you want to place.
• Targets include the rest of the current mesh and every vertex of every other Unibuilder mesh in the scene. Dragging a wall corner onto a floor corner is the intended use.
• In Object mode the whole node snaps by whichever of its vertices is nearest the cursor.
• Release V and the drag goes back to normal grid behavior.

Drawing shapes

Everything in the  Add menu draws directly in the viewport and lands snapped to the grid, on the active grid plane. The button beside Add re-arms the last drawn shape in one click. It carries that shape's own icon, so it always shows what you'll get. The general gesture: press and drag the base, release, move to pull the height, click to commit. Esc cancels at any point, and pressing undo mid-draw cancels the draw too (it never rewinds scene history underneath a half-drawn shape). A dimensions label follows the cursor while you draw.

Every shape you draw stands on its base: its origin sits at the centre of its footprint on the plane you drew it on, and its geometry rises from there. That is what makes textures line up: a door and the wall beside it both measure their default texture from the floor, so they match vertically without switching to world-space texturing, and rotating or scaling a shape in Object mode works about the floor rather than the middle of the air. Center Pivot in the Tools menu moves the origin to the middle if you want it there.

While the tool is armed, the surface under your cursor highlights so you can tell exactly where a draw will land: a teal fill means that face lies on the current drawing plane (you're drawing on this floor); an amber outline means there's a surface there but the grid plane sits at a different height. Nudge the plane with , / . until it fills teal. With Snap on, the two grid lines under the cursor light up teal as well, brightest at the cursor and fading out along each arm, so you can see exactly which grid point a click or a drag corner will land on. They follow the snap lattice, so they also show up on a face you are drawing on with Draw on Surface, where no grid is drawn.

Or skip the plane bookkeeping entirely: the  Draw on Surface toggle (next to the  Grid button) makes armed shapes draw directly on the face under the cursor. The hovered face becomes the drawing plane, height pulls along its normal, and pointing at empty space falls back to the grid. Stacking a crate on a crate or putting a door frame on an upper floor stops needing grid-height nudging.

Plane, Sphere and Trim commit as soon as you release the base drag (they have no height pull).

Every shape remembers the settings you last used for it in this project, and the next one you draw starts from them: draw one turned staircase with a bullnose and the next staircase is turned and bullnosed too, at the same riser height. Only what the drag itself decides comes from the drag: the size, a staircase's step count (from the remembered riser height and the height you pull), a trim's height and which way it faces. The first staircase you draw gets one step per snap increment; every one after that reuses the last riser height you set (see Stairs in the table below).

The shapes

Every solid primitive is watertight, which matters later: booleans require it. Plane is the exception, because a flat open surface has no volume for a boolean to work on.

Editing parameters after committing

After you commit a parametric shape, its parameters appear in the adjust panel floating at the viewport's bottom-right and stay live: change the step count of stairs or the arc segments of an arch and watch it rebuild. The shape stays adjustable until you move on to something else, which commits it as one undo entry.

The panel also keeps presets: once you have a staircase or a trim the way you like it, press Save in the panel's top row, give it a name, and it is stored with the project for that shape (or that action, since bevel, inset and the rest have presets too). Pick a preset from the dropdown to apply it to whatever the panel is showing, including the Trim Walls panel before you confirm. Saving under an existing name replaces it; Delete removes the picked one. A preset never changes the things the drag decided, such as which way a trim faces.

You can come back to them later. Select the shape and press the  parameters button on the toolbar (next to Add and the repeat-shape button) to reopen its controls, including in a later session, since the parameters are saved with the scene. The button is greyed out when the shape's parameters can no longer be used, which happens as soon as the mesh itself is edited: moving a vertex, extruding a face, painting a face, unwrapping it by hand, or freezing its transform all mean a rebuild would throw that work away, so Unibuilder stops offering it. Undo those edits and the parameters come back. Assigning a material is the exception: it carries across a rebuild, so texturing a shape doesn't cost you its parameters. (Per-face materials can't be mapped onto a different face count; if you've assigned several, a rebuild falls back to the first face's material and says so.)

Selection

Modes

1  Object, 2  Vertex, 3  Edge, 4  Face, 5  Paint, 6  Material. Esc returns to Object mode. The toolbar buttons mirror the keys.

Switching modes converts your selection instead of dropping it: a selected face becomes its four edges in Edge mode, its four vertices in Vertex mode, and going back up keeps only elements that are fully covered (two vertices of a quad are not enough to reselect the quad).

Picking

• Click selects, Shift+click adds or removes. As you move the mouse, the element a click would pick lights up.
• Drag in empty space for a marquee. The  X-Ray toggle makes the marquee select through geometry instead of only what you can see.
• Picking works against Unibuilder's own data, so you never need collision shapes for editing.

Loops and rings

• Double-click an edge: edge loop. Alt+double-click: edge ring.
• Double-click a face: face loop, steered by the nearest edge under the cursor.

The selection info panel

Whenever elements are selected, a translucent info panel floats over the viewport's bottom-left corner. It tells you what you have and where it is, in both world and local coordinates, and it costs no dock space. The values sit in read-only fields you can copy from.

• One vertex: editable world X/Y/Z (type exact coordinates; one undo entry per commit) plus the local position.
• One edge: length and midpoint. Several edges: count, total length, and the group's center and bounds.
• One face: corner count, center, world normal, and area. Several faces: count, total area, center, and bounds.
• Groups of vertices show their center (world and local) and bounding size.

If you'd rather read the size off the viewport itself, turn on Show Dimensions in the Tools menu. The selection's world-space size is drawn beside it, or the whole mesh's in Object mode. The setting sticks between sessions.

Selection tools

Transforms

The gizmos

Shift+W  Move, Shift+E  Rotate, Shift+R  Scale (plain W/E/R stay Godot's own tool keys). The same gizmos drive element selections and, when a Unibuilder node is the only thing selected, the whole object in Object mode, so object transforms snap to the same grid as everything else. Multi-object selections keep Godot's native gizmo.

• Move: axis arrows plus a view-plane center square.
• Rotate: three axis circles with a live degree readout. Snapping is 15° steps; drags past 180° keep counting.
• Scale: axis handles plus a uniform center. The readout shows the live factor, and snapping quantizes factors to the grid step (×0.5, ×1.25 and so on).
• Esc cancels any drag in progress. Ctrl inverts snapping while dragging.

Orientation

The toolbar dropdown switches gizmo orientation between Global (world axes), Local (the node's basis), and Normal (the blue axis points out of the selected faces). Normal is the one to use for pushing a slanted face straight out along its own direction.

Proportional editing

The falloff menu beside the orientation dropdown turns proportional editing on and picks its falloff. The button wears the icon of whatever you picked, dimmed while off; choose  Off to turn it off. While a falloff is active, move, rotate, and scale drags also pull the unselected vertices near the selection: full strength at the selection, fading to nothing at the edge of the radius. Dragging one vertex up out of a flat plane makes a hill instead of a spike.

• The falloff sets the shape of the pull, and each menu entry's icon draws its curve.  Smooth eases in and out and suits most work.  Sphere holds close to full strength across the radius and rounds off at the rim;  Root and  Inverse Square sit between Sphere and Linear.  Linear fades evenly with distance.  Sharp concentrates the pull close to the selection.  Constant moves everything inside the radius at full strength, with a hard edge at the rim.
• The number field beside the menu sets the radius in world units.
• During a drag, a teal circle marks the radius. Roll the mouse wheel to grow or shrink it without letting go, and the mesh reshapes as you scroll.
• Grid snapping still applies to the vertices you selected. The soft neighbours stay off the grid on purpose, because snapping a partial offset would break the falloff. Per-element snap follows the same rule: it lands the selected vertices on the grid and leaves the rest free.
• The falloff measures straight-line distance, not distance along the surface, so it reaches through geometry: a vertex on the far side of a thin wall can sit inside the radius. Shrink the radius when that matters.
• The texture survives the sculpt. Faces the drag tilts keep the flat plane's mapping, so a texture runs over the hill unbroken instead of jumping at every edge. See Auto-UV settings.

Shift-drag extrude

In Face mode with the  Move gizmo, hold Shift and drag: the selection extrudes and the new geometry follows the drag. This is the fastest way to rough out volumes.

Shift-drag inset

The same gesture on the  Scale gizmo insets instead. In Face mode, hold Shift and drag a handle: the width appears at the cursor and the faces inset live. Drag an axis handle toward the pivot to inset (dragging away does nothing, since there is no negative inset); from the center square, drag in any direction and the distance you travel is the width. Hold Alt for the equal-width mode, which you can toggle mid-drag. With Snap on, the width lands on grid steps, and Ctrl inverts that as usual.

Releasing the mouse leaves the inset open in the adjust panel, so you can type an exact width or flip Equal after the fact; it commits like any other operation when you move on.

Pivot tools

Editing operations

The toolbar shows the operations valid for the current mode. Anything with parameters opens in the adjust panel after it runs.

The adjust panel

After a parameterised operation runs, its parameters appear in a translucent panel floating at the viewport's bottom-right (the Selection panel's twin on the other corner) and edit live: the mesh re-applies the operation as you change values. Click Apply, run something else, or change the selection and the result commits as one undo entry. Esc in the viewport or Cancel reverts it entirely.

Ctrl+Z while the panel is still up closes the session and undoes the operation, as you would expect, and Ctrl+Shift+Z brings it back. The exception is a gesture still in progress (a gizmo drag, or a Ctrl+B modal drag before you have clicked): there the chord cancels the gesture, exactly like Esc.

There is also a modal version: select edges and press Ctrl+B to drive a bevel's width with the mouse (the wheel changes segment count); in Face mode the same key drives Inset. Click commits, Esc cancels. The panel stays live throughout and its fields follow the mouse, so you can drag to roughly the right value, let go, and type the exact one.

Vertex mode

With exactly one vertex selected, the selection info panel turns its world X/Y/Z into editable fields, so you can type exact coordinates instead of dragging.

Edge mode

Face mode

The Cut tool

 Cut draws a new sub-face directly onto an existing face. Activate it, click a face, click your points, and close via the first point or Enter (Backspace removes the last one). The face re-triangulates cleanly around your polygon, concave faces included, and the new sub-face is selected, ready for an extrude or inset. Cutting a doorway into a wall is the canonical use.

With  Snap on, a cut point prefers the target face's own vertices and edges: come within a few pixels of one and the cursor marker turns amber, and the point lands exactly on it. Otherwise it snaps to a grid at the snap step, laid out in the face's own plane. Putting points on the outer boundary is how you cut a face clean in two instead of carving an island inside it. Ctrl inverts the toggle, same as anywhere else.

Materials and face properties

Materials

In Face mode, the panel on the right edge manages material slots. Pick or create a slot, then Apply assigns it to the selected faces. One mesh can carry any number of materials, and Unibuilder builds one mesh surface for each slot you use.

Faster: drag a material from the FileSystem dock straight onto the mesh in the viewport. In Face mode it lands on the face under the cursor, or on the whole selection if that face is part of it. Object, Vertex, and Edge mode have no face selection to aim at, so a drop there covers the entire mesh. Switch to Face mode first if that isn't what you want.

The material palette

The Palette is a per-project library of your go-to materials. It appears in the right dock whenever you're editing a Unibuilder mesh: under the face panel in Face mode, on its own in every other mode. Click a swatch and it applies to the selected faces; with no face selection (including Object mode) it applies to the whole mesh. Either way it's a single undo step. Drag any material in (from the FileSystem dock, an inspector slot, or with the small + button) to pin it; pinned swatches persist with the project. Swatches also drag back out onto faces, exactly like dragging from the FileSystem dock.

• The last couple of materials you applied by any means appear as dimmed recent swatches automatically; right-click one to pin it for good.
• Right-click a pinned swatch to remove it. If a pinned material's file goes missing, the swatch shows ! with the old path in its tooltip instead of silently disappearing.
• The palette is a project library; the slot list above it belongs to the edited mesh. Removing from one never touches the other.
• Default for new shapes: right-click a swatch → Set as Default. A small corner badge appears ( a teal cog with an amber check mark), and every shape you draw from then on comes out wearing that material, including the live preview and any post-commit parameter tweaks. Right-click again to clear it.

Auto-UV settings

Every face starts with automatic planar UVs. The dominant axis picks which way the texture runs, but the projection lands on the face's own plane, so texel density is the same on a sloped face as on a flat one. A checker stays square on a chamfer, a cone side or a cylinder wall. The face panel adjusts the mapping live per face: offset U/V, rotation, tiling U/V, and a world-space anchor toggle. The ÷2 and ×2 buttons under the tiling pair halve or double both axes at once, which is the power-of-two step texturing usually wants. The  link toggle beside the tiling fields keeps U and V equal: edit either one and both change.

• Local (default): the texture follows the face as the object moves.
• World: the texture stays put in world space while the face slides through it. Handy for continuous brick or tile across separate objects.

Automatic UVs are per-face, so the texture still changes direction where two faces meet at an angle. That is what a box-mapped cube always did at its corners. Bending geometry out of shape is the exception. When a move drag tilts a face by pulling only some of its corners, the face keeps projecting the way it did before the drag instead of switching to its new slope. Sculpt a flat plane into hills with proportional editing and the whole surface keeps its top-down mapping, so the texture runs over the hills without a break; the slopes stretch it a little, which is what a top-down map on a slope always does. A face moved or turned as a whole still re-projects on its new plane, and a face dragged back flat goes back to projecting from its own slope. Press Auto in the UV editor to make a face project from its current slope again. Curved shapes avoid it by arriving pre-unwrapped: cylinders, cones, spheres, toruses and pipes are drawn with continuous UVs already baked onto their curved faces, so a texture runs around the curve unbroken with a single seam per loop. Cylinder, cone and pipe walls unroll flat at exact 1:1 density; spheres use the familiar equirectangular map, with its usual pinch at the poles. Flat caps and bases keep the automatic mapping, which already lines up across them. Beveling works the same way: a bevel bakes UVs onto the band it creates so the texture carries around the corner unbroken from one of the two faces, at the right scale, however many segments the bevel has. Baked faces are manual faces (bright in the UV editor). Edit them there, or press Auto to return them to the automatic per-face mapping. One thing to know: the face panel's offset, rotation and tiling fields drive the automatic mapping only, so on a baked curved wall adjust the texture in the UV editor instead.

Smoothing groups

Each face carries a smoothing group number. Faces in the same group shade smoothly across their shared edges; group 0 means hard. The number field for it is in the face panel. Curved primitives (spheres, cylinder walls, smooth arches) set theirs automatically.

The UV editor

Open the UV Editor bottom panel with a Unibuilder mesh selected. It shows the UV layout of your 3D face selection, or the whole mesh when nothing is selected, over the material's texture. Auto faces draw dimmed; manual faces draw bright. Manual faces behave sensibly when you move geometry afterwards: move or turn a whole face and its texture travels with it, but pull only some of its corners (lifting a cylinder's cap, say) and the texture keeps its size and pattern instead of stretching, just as an auto face would. While your cursor is over the panel, the amber face tint in the 3D viewport hides itself so you can watch the texture move on the mesh as you edit.

Navigation and selection

Moving, scaling, rotating

• Drag moves the selection, snapped to the UV grid step. Editing an auto face quietly bakes it to manual first, so nothing visibly jumps.
• Ctrl+drag scales about the selection center, with a live ×factor readout. Shift while dragging switches to per-axis.
• Alt+drag rotates about the selection center with a degree readout, in 15° detents when Snap is on.

Tools

Material mode

Material mode lines a texture up on a face without leaving the 3D view. Press 6 or click the  Material button in the toolbar's mode switcher. Your selection converts to faces on the way in, the amber face highlight switches off so you can see the texture you are adjusting, and a gizmo appears on the selected face. Click a face to select it, Shift+click to add or remove one, and click empty space to clear. Grow, Shrink, Select All and Invert still work here. Press 6 again, Esc, or any other mode to leave.

The gizmo is built from the face's own texture mapping, so its two axes point the way the texture actually runs across the surface: teal is U, amber is V. Drag the centre square to slide the texture, drag the square at the end of either axis to stretch it along that axis, drag the small square between the two tips to scale it evenly, and drag the ring to turn it. The texture follows the cursor in every case: the spot you grabbed stays under the pointer as you move.

With  Snap on, sliding snaps to the UV editor's grid step, turning snaps to 15 degree steps, and scaling snaps to that same step as a factor. Hold Ctrl to invert that while dragging. Each drag is one undo step. A face still on automatic mapping switches to manual mapping as part of the drag, exactly as it would in the UV editor, so the face panel's offset, rotation and tiling fields no longer apply to it afterwards; the UV editor's Auto button puts it back. With several faces selected, the gizmo sits on the largest one and every selected face moves together about the group's shared centre.

Vertex painting

Paint is a mode like the selection modes: press 5 or click the  Paint button in the toolbar's mode switcher to enter it, and a palette panel docks on the right. Press 5 again, Esc, or any other mode to leave. The mesh stores vertex colors, so they survive baking. They also survive editing: subdivide, merge, connect, insert loop, cut, and bevel all carry the paint across, spreading it over whatever geometry they create.

The brush

• The panel's Brush setting is a real brush: a sphere reticle sits on the surface under the cursor, and press-drag blends color in with radius, strength, and falloff from the panel.
• Holding still doesn't compound: one stroke applies at most one full dab anywhere.
• Fill hard-fills whole faces per click. The mesh shows its wireframe and the face under the cursor lights up so you can see exactly what a click will color. Use it for color-coding blockouts.
• Shift+click eyedrops the color under the cursor. One stroke is one undo entry. Esc cancels a live stroke, then exits paint.
• Swatches: click applies, Ctrl+click (Cmd on Mac) stores the current color. They persist between sessions.

The two-texture blend workflow

The panel's channel mode separates color from alpha so they never fight: Color+Alpha, Color only, or Alpha only.  New Blend Material assigns a material that blends two complete material layers by painted alpha, and tints by painted color. Set the mode to Alpha only, fill in the two layers, and paint dirt, moss, or wear exactly where you want it. If the mask came out the wrong way round, Invert Alpha flips the painted alpha of the selected faces (the whole mesh with no face selection) so the two layers swap places without a repaint. Color is left alone, and one undo puts it back. The material has its own Invert Mask checkbox in its Blend group, which swaps the layers for every face using that material without changing the paint at all. Use the panel button when the mask on some faces is wrong, and the material checkbox when the whole material simply has its layers the wrong way round.

You can also create one by hand anywhere a material goes: in any material slot, open the resource dropdown and pick UBBlendMaterial from the New list, alongside StandardMaterial3D.

Filling in two layers by hand is a lot of clicking, so Tools ▸ Blend Layer A from Material… (and the Layer B twin) copies an existing material into one layer in a single step. Point it at any StandardMaterial3D or ORMMaterial3D and it brings across albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, height, emission, and the UV tiling. An ORM texture is wired into all three of its channels automatically. Maps the source has switched off stay off, so what you get looks like what the source looked like. It fills the blend material on the selected faces, or the mesh's own if nothing is selected, and it's one undo step.

Blend materials get their own swatch preview in the material palette: a sphere with noisy vertex alpha, so you can see both layers and the transition between them at a glance. Godot's own material preview (the sphere in the inspector, and the thumbnail in the FileSystem dock) can't show this, because its preview mesh has no vertex colours to blend by, so it shows layer B only. The palette swatch is the one to trust.

Each layer (Layer A, Layer B in the inspector) takes the same maps a standard material does (albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, emission) plus its own UV tiling and offset, so the two halves can use different texture scales. Every map is optional: an empty slot falls back to that layer's slider. The roughness, metallic, and AO slots each pick a color channel, so one ORM texture feeds all three (AO = Red, Roughness = Green, Metallic = Blue).

Under Blend, Height Blend changes what the paint means. At 0 the layers cross-fade evenly. Raise it with height maps assigned and the layers interlock by their own relief instead, so gravel pokes through mud and mortar shows between bricks. Blend Sharpness sets how wide the transition band is; small values give a hard, rocky edge. If one layer's height map runs brighter than the other's and drowns it out, each layer has a Height Offset to level the contest: raise the quiet layer or lower the loud one until a 50/50 paint reads as 50/50.

The same height maps can carve apparent depth into the surface: enable Deep Parallax (in the material's Parallax group) and the view sinks into the blended relief exactly like the standard material's mode of the same name, with the same Scale and Min/Max Layers settings. It follows whichever layer is showing: paint gravel over mud and you look down into the gravel, not the mud. Off by default; it costs a texture-march per pixel, so treat it as a hero-surface effect rather than a blockout default.

Booleans

 Tools menu: Boolean Union / Subtract / Intersect. Select mesh A, then add mesh B to the selection so both are selected, and run the operation. B is consumed, A becomes the result, and the result is ordinary editable geometry. One undo restores both.

Both meshes must be watertight (every edge shared by exactly two faces). If the edited mesh isn't, the operation refuses and selects the offending edges for you, switched into Edge mode. Usually a Fill Hole or Conform Normals fixes it, then run the boolean again.

• Materials survive: result surfaces keep the operand they came from.
• An intersect of two meshes that don't overlap warns and changes nothing.
• Marked experimental: the underlying kernel (Godot's Manifold CSG) is solid, but re-building clean editable n-gons from its output is best-effort on complex results.

Object tools

Whole-object operations (Tools menu)

Collision

The collision_mode property on the node maintains an automatic collision body that regenerates on every edit and exists in exported games:

The body is a child node named _UBCollision. It isn't stored in your scene file. The node rebuilds it from the mesh every time the scene loads, so it always matches the geometry and never goes stale. Baking is the exception: a baked mesh has no Unibuilder script left to rebuild anything, so the bake writes a real collision body into the scene.

Collider and Trigger volumes

Set Collider and Set Trigger in the Tools menu mark a mesh as invisible helper geometry: tinted in the editor (orange for colliders, blue for triggers), hidden when the game runs, with the physics child left behind. A Collider keeps a StaticBody3D for invisible walls; a Trigger swaps it for an Area3D ready to fire body_entered. Running the same item again returns the mesh to normal.

Baking and exporting

You don't have to bake to get lightmaps. Live Unibuilder meshes generate their own UV2s too, so LightmapGI works on them as they are; the unwrap waits until a moment after you stop editing, so it never slows a drag down. The Live lightmap UV2 preference turns it off. Bake when you want to ship the geometry without the editing data attached.

Preferences

 Tools ▸ Preferences: overlay colors, vertex handle size, the face-mode Grow angle limit (180 disables it), the lightmap texel size, and Live lightmap UV2 (on by default), which generates UV2s on live meshes as well as baked ones. Turn that one off if you never light your blockout. Settings persist per project.

Keyboard reference

Performance and limits

• Editing cost scales linearly with face count. Typical blockout objects (up to roughly 1,000 faces) edit at full interactivity; at 5,000+ faces drags update at a few frames per second. Split very large levels across several objects, which you'd want anyway for undo granularity and occlusion.
• Paint strokes never trigger a recompile, so painting stays fast even on dense meshes.
• Unibuilder recompiles the whole mesh on every change. That is deliberate: it keeps every operation correct and every undo exact.
• The benchmark script that produced the published numbers ships in the repository; methodology is in the README.

Scene file size and load time

A Unibuilder mesh saves both its editable data and its compiled mesh into the scene, so scenes with a lot of geometry in them get large. It costs roughly 450 bytes per face, a little under two thirds of which is the editing data. That's fine at blockout scale (fifty cubes is about 160 KB), and it grows in a straight line from there: a single very dense 5,000-face mesh is around 2.3 MB on its own and adds about a fifth of a second to opening the scene.

Two things help, and both are worth doing on a large project:

• Save scenes in Godot's binary format (.scn instead of .tscn). About 35% smaller and roughly three times faster to load, with no change to how you work. Text scenes are the friendlier choice for version control on small scenes, but once a scene holds thousands of faces its diffs stop being readable anyway.
• Bake meshes you've finished editing. Dropping the editing data more than halves the file, and a baked mesh in a binary scene loads essentially instantly. On the 5,000-face mesh above that is 0.6 ms against 70 ms. Bake as a shipping step once a piece of geometry has stopped changing.

Troubleshooting

Found a bug? Report it on the issue tracker. Include your Godot version, what you did, and what you expected. If you can attach a small scene that shows the problem, the fix arrives faster.

License, in short

Per-seat: one license per person using the plugin in the editor, on as many of their machines as they like. You can use it on as many projects as you like, commercial ones included, and you owe no royalties. Games you ship may embed the plugin's runtime files. You may not redistribute the plugin itself, publicly or privately, modified or not. The full EULA ships with your purchase and is the binding text.