How do you highlight an object pointed to by a raycast unity 3d?

Questions & Answers
1

Hello everyone, I was wondering how to highlight an object with a raycast in unity 3d. By highlight, I mean make the object pointed to by a raycast turn a chosen color, then when the ray cast isn’t touching the object, it goes back to it’s normal color.

2

Hello,

Just set a script that raycast through your scene, then when you hit something you can retrieve the hit object and assign a colour to its material, or you can also set a specific shader that highlight your object, or whatever you want. Then record a reference of your object (tag, name, ID, …). When you hit an object check if it is a new one (It mean different than the previous one), if it is the case just cancel the selected effect on the previous and enable it on the hit one !

3

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class PlayerRayCasting : MonoBehaviour
{
    public float distanceToSee;
    public string ObjectName;
    private Color highlightColor;
    Material originalMaterial, tempMaterial;
    Renderer rend = null;

    void Start()
    {
        highlightColor = Color.green;
    }


    // Update is called once per frame
    void Update ()
    {
        RaycastHit hitInfo;
        Renderer currRend;

        //Draws ray in scene view during playmode; the multiplication in the second parameter controls how long the line will be
        Debug.DrawRay(this.transform.position, this.transform.forward * distanceToSee, Color.magenta);

        //A raycast returns a true or false value
        //we  initiate raycast through the Physics class
        //out parameter is saying take collider information of the object we hit, and push it out and 
        //store is in the what I hit variable. The variable is empty by default, but once the raycast hits
        //any collider, it's going to take the information, and store it in whatIHit variable. So then,
        //if I wanted to access something, I could access it through the whatIHit variable. 

        if (Physics.Raycast(this.transform.position, this.transform.forward, out hitInfo, distanceToSee))
        {
            currRend = hitInfo.collider.gameObject.GetComponent<Renderer>();

            if (currRend == rend)
                return;

            if (currRend && currRend != rend)
            {
                if (rend)
                {
                    rend.sharedMaterial = originalMaterial;
                }

            }

            if (currRend)
                rend = currRend;
            else
                return;

            originalMaterial = rend.sharedMaterial;

            tempMaterial = new Material(originalMaterial);
            rend.material = tempMaterial;
            rend.material.color = highlightColor;
        }
        else
        {
            if (rend)
            {
                rend.sharedMaterial = originalMaterial;
                rend = null;
            }
        }                                                                                    
    }
}