Godot gets its own ProBuilder — blockout without Blender

Developer Calin Leafshade has released Unibuilder — an addon that embeds a set of polygon modeling tools into the Godot editor. In terms of features it mirrors what Unity users rely on for level blockout: drawing primitives right in the viewport, editing vertices, edges and polygons, boolean operations, UV and baking of the finished geometry. Game From Scratch describes the addon as “ProBuilder for Godot”.

A level prototype no longer requires an external DCC package: modeling, texturing and baking all happen in the same scene, without switching between applications.

What sets the addon apart from Godot's stock CSG nodes is the type of the result. Every Unibuilder object is an ordinary MeshInstance3D that the engine understands without the plugin: it renders, collects lightmaps and works with collisions through standard means. Boolean operations rely on the Manifold CSG core from Godot itself, and if a mesh is not watertight, the addon highlights the problematic edges.

What exactly the level designer gets

• Shape tools drawn along the snap grid: cube, plane, cylinder, cone, prism, stairs and curved stairs, arch, door, sphere, torus, pipe and an arbitrary poly shape. Parameters stay editable after creation.
• Four working modes — object, vertices, edges, polygons — with box selection, loops and rings, growing and shrinking the selection, selecting similar elements and highlighting under the cursor. Selection carries over between modes.
• Mesh operations: extrude, inset, multi-segment bevel, bridge, weld, connect, loop insertion, subdivide, merge, detach, hole filling and cut, which handles concave faces.
• A reference grid on any of the planes with a step matching the snap value, plus precise placement of a vertex onto any other vertex, including on another object, by holding the V key.
• A last-operation panel: parameters are edited live after the operation has already run, and all of it lands in the undo history as a single step.
• Automatic planar UVs per face plus a two-dimensional UV editor — projections, stitching and splitting seams, working with islands, copying and normalizing texel density.
• Assigning materials by dragging them onto faces and vertex painting with a brush that has radius, strength and falloff, as well as a shader for blending two textures via the painted alpha.
• Game preparation: collider and trigger volumes, auto-generation of convex, trimesh and ramp collisions, baking to MeshInstance3D with UV2 for lightmaps, export to OBJ+MTL and glTF, and conversion of existing triangle meshes into an editable object.

The addon is written in pure GDScript, so a .NET build is not required. Support is stated for Godot 4.7 and newer on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Where the line runs between the free and paid versions

The free version, by Game From Scratch's assessment, is feature-rich; the full one is distributed for money and sold through itch.io — a purchase link is on the Unibuilder page. The license is issued per seat, covers an unlimited number of projects, involves no royalties on games and includes all updates in the 1.x branch.

Why a tool like this has appeared in Godot right now

The absence of a stock blockout toolset has long been a weak spot for Godot: the built-in CSG nodes were conceived as a rough-draft tool and are a poor fit for large geometry. Unibuilder fills that niche through the efforts of a single independent developer rather than the engine team.

The very appearance of a paid addon of this scale speaks to the maturity of the ecosystem: a market for commercial tools is forming around Godot. This is likely tied to the influx of developers who have moved to the engine over recent years — and along with them, habits from Unity came to Godot, where ProBuilder has long been considered a basic tool for prototyping levels. If the trend holds, the nearest gaps — animation, terrain, tools for large scenes — will start being filled by third-party paid solutions as well. For studios this means a rising cost of entry into Godot, but also a narrowing of the pipeline-capability gap with commercial engines.

What in Unibuilder would you try first?

• Boolean operations
• Extruding primitives