Render Meshes vs Physics Colliders

Unity’s NavMeshSurface supports two source modes:

• Render Meshes — Bakes directly from mesh data. Requires meshes to be marked read/write enabled and breaks on static batching.

• Physics Colliders — Bakes from colliders in the scene. This is safer, faster, and does not require mesh read/write access.

Runtime NavMesh Baker behavior (v1.3.0 and newer)

• DynamicNavMeshSurface automatically overrides surfaces to use Physics Colliders.

• This avoids common errors like:

  “Source mesh XXX does not allow read access.”

• If you intentionally want to bake from Render Meshes, you can still switch the NavMeshSurface manually — but you must ensure all contributing meshes are readable.