Drawing a line in-game that follows terrain formation

Unity Engine
1

Hello!

I’m trying to create a system that allows the player to create kind of paths in-game.

So what this means is that the player can click somewhere in the terrain to place a starting point (point A) of the path and then click somewhere else in the terrain to place the ending point (point B) and the game would draw a line between those points.

I was reading the documentation of unity’s line renderer and the documentation says the following:
The Line Renderer takes an array of two or more points in 3D space and draws a straight line between each one.

I don’t however want the line to be straight. I want it to follow the formation of the terrain. So to explain it we would have point A on the other side of some mountain and point B on the other side. When player has placed the points I don’t want the line to be drawn through that mountain but over it following the formation of the terrain.

Would the line renderer be a good way to approach this problem? Can this be achieved with it?

Thanks!

2

You could cast rays down on the terrain at certain intervals between A and B and store the hit positions in a list. Then you can draw lines between those points. If that doesn’t give you the required quality or it’s too slow you might want to do some research on pathfinding.

3

You could also sample some heights on the terrain between point A and point B, with the Terrain classes.

4

In theory pathfinding might be what I’m looking for. I definitely have to do more research on that. Also I hadn’t even thought about the other option, interesting thought. Thanks guys!