The Autodesk Navigation SDK includes tools for generating NavData automatically from your terrain meshes. These tools offer you the choice of several different workflows for generating your NavData, summarized in the sections below.

These different workflows are equivalent in the sense that they all ultimately use the same code and libraries to generate the NavData, and the NavData they generate is of equal quality. You can choose whichever approach fits best into your pipeline and your desired way of using Autodesk Navigation.

The standalone Navigation Lab provides a visual, interactive tool for generating and visualizing your NavData.

Using the Navigation Lab, you can:

• Generate NavData from .obj files that contain your terrain meshes.
• Set up a build configuration that indicates which sectors are exclusive, and which sectors you want to rebuild each time you generate.
• Set TagVolumes that tag areas of your terrain with custom data or that exclude areas from NavData generation.
• Place seed points to identify the areas that should be walkable for your characters.
• View the generated NavData and run spatial queries and pathfinding queries on it.

Because the Navigation Lab provides immediate feedback on the NavData it generates, it is the recommended means of generating NavData during your initial evaluation. For a step-by-step tutorial, see Integration Phase 2: Generating your First NavData.

However, because generating NavData through the Navigation Lab requires human interaction, you will most likely abandon it in favor of one of the other tools described below as you integrate Autodesk Navigation more deeply into your production pipeline.

The navgenlauncher tool is a command-line utility for generating NavData directly from XML configuration files called .navgenproj files, which specify input .obj files and other configuration parameters.

You can use the navgenlauncher via script, or by invoking it from your own editor or custom tool. For example, when you generate NavData using the Navigation Lab, the navgenlauncher tool is transparently invoked to perform the actual generation. Therefore, the navgenlauncher supports all the same features as the Navigation Lab, except that instead of providing inputs through a visual interface you provide them in the input configuration files.

This command-line approach to NavData generation may be suited to production pipelines in which large sets of geometry data must be regularly generated in batches, such as by a nightly build script. However, since the navgenlauncher tool is a generic tool that works primarily from input geometry in .obj format, and since it does not expose all of the possibilities of the NavData generation framework, you may instead want to consider creating your own similar custom tool that invokes the NavData generation API directly.

For detailed information on how to use the navgenlauncher, and on the input files you can provide, see navgenlauncher.

It is anticipated that most clients will want to use the API of the NavData generation framework directly. This approach offers all the possibilities of the standalone tools listed above, plus:

• You can pass Autodesk Navigation the triangles in your terrain mesh directly, without passing through intermediate .obj files.
• You get the richest set of configuration parameters and the most control over sectorization, file naming conventions, output directories, coordinate system transformations, etc.
• You can post-process NavData to generate PointGraphs, or to query the NavMesh for other custom purposes such as generating cover points.
• You have full control over the iterative build workflow.

Most projects using Autodesk Navigation will quickly reach a point at which the simplicity of using the standalone NavData generation tools will be overshadowed by the difficulty of managing large sets of geometry data. At this point, it is assumed that you will integrate the NavData generation framework into your own level editing tool or custom application. However, this is not absolutely necessary; you can switch to this approach at any time in your production cycle, or not at all if you are comfortable working with the standalone tools.

For a tutorial that shows how to do a first integration of the NavData generation framework into your game editor or custom tool, see Integration Phase 6: Using the NavData Generation API. For code examples that show additional uses or features, such as PointGraph generation and iterative rebuilding, see the Examples.