Using Unity to find best object moving path inside a building?

Hi, Everyone
I'm a BIM modeler for facility management and never use Unity.
I need to find out if is possible to move a large object to its target location in the building without hitting any walls and columns.(Please see attached image)

My goals are:
Find out if is possible to move to the final location(object can be too large)
if yes, generate the best moving path with minimum object rotation needed.

I know the Unity has some build-in feature for path-finding, so I'm wondering if this is a right software that I can start with to solve this kind of problems. Any suggestion and tip will be very appreciate. and please feel free to ask any questions. Thank you!

 

Yes, this is exactly the type of thing the NavMesh system is built for.
You simply bake your building as a Navmesh with the walls in mind, set up an Agent with the correct dimensions you have in mind, and then give said agent a destination.
For a step-by-step guide, see this tutorial series here.

 

Hi, Yandalf
Thank you for reply. This is a very good starting point for me.

 

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I think Unity's pathfinding assumes a cylindrical collision volume and thus doesn't take rotation into account. So an object like in the image above that is very skinny and long probably won't get a very accurate solve.

 

You're right about that. You'll probably have to write your own agent in case you're dealing with agents that don't fit inside a standing cylinder. Alternatively you can set the agent's cylinder size to the largest size of your block, making it impossible to get into nooks and crannies.

 

After I did some research I find out this is a more complicated 3 dimensional (x,y,rotation) motion planning problem. Use more often on robotic programming. Wondering if Unity have a built-in function for that?
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MatthewKlingensmith/20130907/199787/Overview_of_Motion_Planning.php

 

Unfortunately no, if you need to solve things this way you'll have to roll your own solution. You could take a look on the asset store, but I don't know if anyone's ever made an asset for this kind of planning.