A painted trap with a lethal boundary
In Tomb Raider, some spike traps look three-dimensional but are actually images painted onto flat surfaces. The artwork supplies the visual warning; a separate, invisible collision box determines where the game treats the trap as solid and dangerous.
A collision box is an unseen shape used to decide when objects in a game touch. As Lara moves through the space, the game checks her position against that shape. Cross its boundary, and the trap can trigger the impalement sequence—even though the visible spikes have no physical depth of their own.
One scene, two kinds of geometry
This separation lets the game present a convincing hazard without modeling every spike as a fully three-dimensional object. The image tells the player what the trap is; the collision boundary makes it function. Those two layers need not match exactly: the lethal area can be simpler than the artwork, and it may be difficult to judge its edge from the picture alone.
That mismatch helps explain why a trap can feel unexpectedly unforgiving. Players are reading a painted surface as if it had real depth, while the game is enforcing an invisible boundary. The lethal detail is not the apparent point of a spike, but the hidden line the player crosses.
