I’ve learned that video game ‘clipping’ is caused by high velocity, thin colliders, and too-slow physics updates. Why are terrain surfaces in most 3D video games paper-thin? Why isn’t terrain given extra fill/thickness inside and under it to prevent ‘falling through the map into the void’?

Question

I could see why you might not want to fill under the terrain in a game that features things like underground caves, but thin terrain seems to be present in a huge majority of 3D games (even those without underground features) and is not engine-specific. Why is terrain almost always a fragile piece of origami that’s so easily punctured?

In: Technology

Answer 1

One important thing to note is that surfaces don’t have thickness, it’s a bunch of triangles stringed together. This makes it that if your character intersects with one of those triangles the physics engine starts calculating if and how it should push you away.

So in short, it’s actually a bunch of 2d surfaces spanned in a 3d world