  Population synthesis relies on semi-analytic formulae to determine masses of
compact objects from the (helium or carbon-oxygen) cores of collapsing stars.
Such formulae are combined across mass ranges that span different explosion
mechanisms, potentially introducing artificial features in the compact object
mass distribution. Such artifacts impair the interpretation of
gravitational-wave observations. We propose a "top-down" remnant mass
prescription where we remove mass from the star for each possible mass-loss
mechanism, instead of relying on the fallback onto a "proto-compact-object" to
get the final mass. For one of these mass-loss mechanisms, we fit the
metallicity-dependent mass lost to pulsational-pair instability supernovae from
numerical simulations. By imposing no mass loss in the absence of pulses, our
approach recovers the existing compact object masses prescription at the low
mass end and ensures continuity across the
core-collapse/pulsational-pair-instability regime. Our remnant mass
prescription can be extended to include other mass-loss mechanisms at the final
collapse.
