Vehcile without PhaT and convex mesh collision

Hello,

I am working on a project with approximately 100 vehicles that need to be imported and reworked from time to time.

Right now I am working with the integrated vehicle implementation, but there are a lot of steps involved to set up a vehicle and there are a lot of things to take care of like the axis alignment requirement.

So I am thinking about writing my own implementation using Physx, where you simply create a data asset containing all the vehicle information (engine, wheel setup, name of the meshes, …).

But before I start this I have some questions:

  1. Is PhaT only used to setup collision shapes? Can I ignore PhaT and setup the collision shapes with code?
  2. Is it possible to use conves meshes as collision shape for the chassis? According to the Physx manual it should be possible, but I have never done this before.

PhysX manual about shapes: http://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/physx/guide/Manual/Shapes.html

Thank you for your help