Programming-by-Example for Batch-Editing Collision Meshes in 3D Software

2026-07-09

AI Summary

Manually editing heterogeneous collision meshes in bulk is time-consuming and poorly scalable, while existing automatic methods often fail to accurately capture user intent. This work introduces neural symbolic program synthesis to 3D collision mesh editing for the first time, formulating the task as a programming-by-example problem: users provide only a few edited examples, and the system automatically synthesizes a reusable program that generalizes to similar meshes. Evaluated on 24 tasks involving 600 meshes, the approach successfully completes 23 tasks, requiring an average of just 2.2 examples per task and synthesizing programs in approximately 3.5 seconds, thereby significantly improving both editing efficiency and scalability.

Abstract

As 3D software proliferates, software artifacts now extend beyond code and 2D user interfaces to include 3D assets. Among these assets, collision meshes are critical as they define the geometry used by physics engines for collision detection and physical interaction. Although existing tools can automatically generate collision meshes from visual meshes, they often fail to capture the intended interaction behavior. As a result, developers need to manually edit many heterogeneous collision meshes, a process that is time-consuming and challenging to scale. To address this problem, we present a neuro-symbolic program synthesis approach for batch-editing collision meshes. We formulate the task as a programming-by-example problem: given a family of collision meshes with the same editing intent and a small number of user demonstrations, our approach synthesizes a reusable program that captures the editing intent and applies it to non-demonstration meshes. We implement this in a tool named MeshForge, and evaluate it across 24 tasks on 600 collision meshes. MeshForge successfully synthesizes 23/24 tasks, requiring 2.2 demonstrations and 3.5 seconds of synthesis time on average.

Problem

• collision meshes
• batch-editing
• 3D software
• manual editing
• interaction behavior

Innovation

• programming-by-example
• collision mesh editing
• neuro-symbolic program synthesis
• batch editing
• 3D asset manipulation