[IDEA] Plane Triangles Primitives #314
Description
Goal Description
We need a triangle prefab because it's the fundamental building block of 3D games. Every mesh in the engine is already triangles under the hood. Quads? Triangulated. N-gons? Triangulated. The GPU literally won't draw anything else. Pretending triangles don't matter is pretending the renderer doesn't exist.
Why it matters as a prefab:
Debugging tool: lets us visualize core geometry and collision at the lowest level.
Prototyping: great for testing shading, UVs, normals, culling, and lighting without extra complexity.
Performance testing: isolate how the engine handles the smallest renderable primitive.
Teaching/onboarding: not everyone understands that the entire graphics pipeline is triangle-based. This forces clarity.
Procedural generation: having a triangle prefab avoids reinventing a base unit every time we create procedural meshes.
Accurate lighting + physics tests: triangles avoid distortions and math errors larger primitives introduce.
The engine already lives and dies by triangles. Adding a prefab isn't “extra” — it’s exposing the core mechanic that’s already doing all the work.
It’s like adding a brick prefab in a building game. Why wouldn't you expose the thing the whole world is built from?
If someone still says no, they're not thinking about how GPUs work — they're thinking about aesthetics. This isn’t aesthetics.
This is correctness and developer efficiency.
Short version:
We aren’t adding a triangle prefab “for fun.” We’re adding it because the whole engine is made of triangles, and pretending otherwise wastes time and hides the truth of the pipeline.
Notes
Also — having a triangle prefab is straight-up useful for modeling.
If we ever do in-engine mesh editing, procedural mesh building, or block-style construction, triangles give us:
The smallest, most precise modeling unit
Control over topology instead of letting auto-triangulation guess wrong
Clean subdivision and deformation foundations
Guaranteed predictable geometry for bevels, cuts, and booleans
Accurate UV seams so the texture doesn’t stretch like garbage
Artists already fight auto-generated triangles that cause shading artifacts, bad normals, or broken deformation. Giving them a raw triangle prefab means:
They can build precise low-poly shapes
They can lock geometry exactly how they want
They don't get surprise splits from the engine later
This isn't “just a triangle.”
It’s literally the atom of 3D modeling.
Take it away and you’re building with mystery mesh.
Give it to us, and we can build anything — clean and intentional.