Summary In this paper, we present a generalized prismatic hybrid meshing method for viscous flow simulations. One major difficulty in implementing a robust prismatic hybrid meshing tool is to handle boundary layer mesh collisions, and normally an extra data structure (e.g. quadtree in two‐dimensional and octree in three‐dimensional) is required. The proposed method overcomes this difficulty via an heuristic approach, and it only relies on constrained delaunay triangulation/tetrahedralization(CDT). No extra data structures are required. Geometrical reasoning is used to approximate the maximum marching distance of each point by walking through the CDT. This is combined with post‐processing of marching vectors and distance and prohibition of multilevel differences to form an automatic and robust mechanism to remove boundary layer mesh collisions. Benefiting from the matureness of CDT techniques, the proposed method is robust, efficient and simple to implement. Its capability is demonstrated by generating quality prismatic hybrid meshes for industrial models with complex geometries. The proposed method is believed to be able considerably reduce the effort to implement a robust hybrid prismatic mesh generator for viscous flow simulations. © 2016 The Authors. International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.