Yes, navigation meshes can be created either automatically, by a designer, or through a mixture of the 2 (usually they are first computed and then adjusted by s

Yes, navigation meshes can be created either automatically, by a designer, or through a mixture of the 2 (usually they are first computed and then adjusted by someone). Indeed, automatic and stable generation is essential in case of big, procedurally generated scenes, and it would be in general a nice achievement for the field. gmaslov provided links that explain some common ways of generating navigation meshes, that quickly looked to me like improved/refined application of the "flood filling" method. I just wanted to point out that there is a very interesting way (imho) of generating a 2D/multilayered navigation mesh, which is, by computing the Generalized Voronoi Diagram of the obstacles and then by annotating the vertices (and thus edges) of the graph with information about the closest obstacles' points. This way, we have both a "backbone graph" and a subdivision (a mesh). Here is a link to the related research of my Uni: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gerae101/motion_planning/ecm.html http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gerae101/motion_planning/ecm... check it out if you are interested, there are also a couple of summarizing images and videos. The advantage is that such meshes are smoother, compact, yet they ensure very good coverage of the walkable space. Disclaimer: I am a MSc student working on the above method for my final thesis (involving GPGPU steps and a true multi-tiled approach).