#UNITY SPHERECAST HOW TO#
#UNITY SPHERECAST CODE#

This simply returns true if there are any colliders overlapping the sphere, so this does work, is simple, but doesn’t return any information about the collider or colliders within the sphere. An even simpler way to check for colliders within a sphere is to use CheckSphere. OverlapSphere does do much of this, but I found as it returns Collider, not RaycastHit, one also needs additional information from methods such as Collider.ClosestPointOnBounds to find the something approximating a “hit location”. I think it’s important to note that many users want to check for hits within a sphere from an origin.

If you google/search “SphereCast” on the forums and Unity Answers, you will see that many (most?) people don’t understand SphereCast and are using it improperly. This needs to be something along the lines of: “Casts a sphere (origin, radius) along a ray (origin, direction, distance) using layers (layerMask) to return an array (out hitInfo) containing detailed information on each collider which was hit by the sphere while traveling along the ray.” The following description: “Casts a sphere against all colliders in the scene …” is under-descriptive and confusing. SphereCast moves a Sphere volume down the direction and distance of a ray and detects what it bumps into. This is not true, tho’ people try to use it like this. Most users come across SphereCast and don’t understand it because they feel that SphereCasting should be “like a ray” but casting out in a sphere around the origin – Like OverlapSphere but instead of returning Collider it returns RaycastHit. This is closely related to what the user’s expectations of Spherecasts are. We had a long conversation about casting and the confusion in the documentation and there is one fundamental misunderstanding about how these volume casts work that is not addressed in the docs. Think of the sphere cast like a thick raycast. This is useful when a Raycast does not give enough precision, because you want to find out if an object of a specific size, such as a character, will be able to move somewhere without colliding with anything on the way.

The easiest way for me to describe Spherecasts in the shortest terms possible is to post my bug report:Ĭasts a sphere against all colliders in the scene and returns detailed information on what was hit. I currently run events out of the Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco as well! If your nearby and want to learn things or join a workshop in person checkout our meetup group.SphereCast and all related pages are confusing. If your interested in some of my other Cloud based videos I stream at /MicrosoftDeveloper regularly and some of my other videos can be found on the Microsoft Reactor YouTube channel: Looking for an introduction to Raycasts? Check out my video on Raycasting in Unity: Using UnityEngine public class ThirdPersonCamera : MonoBehaviour

#UNITY SPHERECAST CODE#

The code we wrote in this video is here if you’d like to try it yourself! You can find more information about SphereCast’s in Unity’s documentation here: This gives our camera some safety and improves the quality of the camera positioning. In order to prevent our camera from clipping geometry inside those alleyways and to prevent it from ending up in a narrow space we’ll project a sphere using a SphereCast. To showcase this, we’re going to build a quick 3rd Person Camera in a scene that has some narrow alleyways. This can prevent the detection from going through tight spaces or between closely aligned Game Objects. Unlike a raycast though a SphereCast includes a radius. SphereCast’s expand upon what you might know about raycasts projecting a beam through your scene that can detect physical objects in the scene and let you know if it’s hit them.

#UNITY SPHERECAST HOW TO#

Hello again internet! Let’s dive into how to manage camera physics in your third person cameras using SphereCasts.

Unity spherecast