efficient camera-object culling for visibility

Unity Engine
1

Hello friendly forum:

I have a 3rd-person game with a camera that follows the character. Because the camera is player-controllable, it’s possible to swing it behind/through objects that will obscure the player during play. My solution for this was to cast a ray from the camera to the player, and if the ray hits anything but the player, the object is faded out.

Now, I am concerned about performance. Should I be? The game is not complex and does not have a great deal of geometry or detail. Raycasting is also not a hugely-expensive function, and I’ll be putting tags on the objects allowed to cull so my raycast isn’t assessing the entire scene.

So basically I wanted to see if I was going about this the right way. Are there better alternatives?

Thank you for your collective and more experienced assessment of my approach!

2

This should work fine, especially if your game is really simple. Here is a video tutorial with a lot of information on making a 3rd person camera, they do it with ray casting, but i think they cast the ray from the character to the camera. Check it out http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/content.php?212

3

Perfect! I love 3D Buzz, those guys are really helpful.

Thanks very much for the reply. :slight_smile: