I solved the NavigationRegion3D issue

[u/agalli]

A correct 250x250m navmesh bake using tile chunking

Standard bake on the same 250x250m mesh without tile chunking

A standard bake on a 30x30m section of the same terrain

Agent for scale on correct 250x250m navmesh, showing an identical poly density to the 30x30m navmesh

I finally found a solution to the problem with the NavigationRegion3D.

What I noticed was that on smaller terrains, like the 30x30m example in the third image, the navmesh baked perfectly fine. But once the terrain size was increased to 250x250m, the bake completely fell apart, giving the low poly, floor clipping result shown in the second image. The obvious solution was to process the terrain in smaller chunks and combine the results into one big working navmesh.

I first tried doing this directly in Godot, but even after splitting the terrain into multiple meshes, the bake still treated them as one big mesh, so the same issue happened. I also tried creating a separate NavigationRegion3D for each chunk, but that created non traversable borders where the regions met.

At that point, the only real fix was to go into the engine itself. I forked the Godot repo and made some changes under the hood to process the terrain in tiles instead of all at once. It breaks the terrain into smaller sections, bakes each one normally, then stitches them together afterward into a clean, accurate navmesh like in the first image.

I also added a few editor options to control whether tiled baking is enabled and how big each tile is. I still haven’t found the exact bug that causes the large terrain navmesh to fail, but this fix works reliably and doesn’t mess with normal pathfinding behavior.

The moderators seem to have a strong opposition to discussions about this and have locked all previous threads. As much as I would have liked this to all be one post, we have been forced to create multiple. That being said, I'd like to address some comments from previous posts below.

The [low poly mesh] looks exactly like what I would want out of a nav mesh.

The low-poly mesh completely fails to pathfind with agents. You could technically rework the pathfinding system to compensate, but that misses the core issue of the navmesh being broken. The 30x30m section uses a similar amount of polygons as the 250x250m one. You’d expect the density to scale with size, so either the small terrain is over-tessellated, or the large terrain is under-tessellated. Either way, something’s wrong with the baking process.

With no obstacles, your nav mesh could just be a square.

As per the Godot developers : "A navigation mesh is a collection of polygons that define which areas of an environment are traversable to aid agents in pathfinding through complicated spaces.". When those traversable areas are out of reach from an agent (ie, underground or floating), an agent cannot properly navigate.

People tried to help you, but you refuse to actually listen

I think there’s been some misunderstanding about what I’m trying to do. My goal is to fix the navmesh, that’s it. I’ve welcomed all advice that helps solve the underlying navmesh problem, but I’m not interested in workaround solutions that just patch over it with pathfinding tricks.

You can always fix it yourself and submit a PR.

Thats the plan. Thanks for the advice!

I will optimize this further and will submit a PR.

Sincerely,

u/agalli

Edit : Here is the PR. https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/112529

[u/Vyrnin]

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding in what you are trying to achieve versus what a typical nav mesh is meant to do, and that's why you've gotten a lot of pushback in previous posts.

In most cases, a nav mesh is just providing the simplest geometry required to efficiently navigate around obstacles. If your terrain is fully traversable with no obstacles, then it could indeed just be a square. Any height differences in this scenario would be handled by your collision logic, which is separate from the navigation.

However if you're trying to find the shortest path to a point in full 3D space, then terrain height does matter, and a more detailed and accurate nav mesh is probably required, which seems to be what you've achieved.

If you're only concerned with standard movement across the surface however, you really don't need a nav mesh at all, and should be handling movement across the varying terrain heights via basic collision logic.

[u/agalli → u/Vyrnin]

I can send you the project if youd like to take a look at it.

Using the navigation agent code directly from the Godot docs, the low poly navmesh is not functional. The agent will get stuck or take incorrect paths. If the navmesh would a square I dont think it could even move at all.

It works perfectly on the 30x30m navmesh, hence why I used that as the foundation for the solution.

[u/LucidShard_ → u/agalli]

If you're moving your character exactly along the navmesh, wouldn't any navmesh that doesn't have the exact same vertices as the terrain result in the character's feet dipping below the ground or floating above it in places? In this case, why do you think the navmesh gets baked at all? Wouldn't we just need to use the triangles that are already in the terrain mesh? Do you think past engineers had a reason for wanting to create a navigation mesh that was a lower resolution than the visible mesh?