Picking up Objects

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

I am new to Unity and I was wondering how I could make a character (in this case, a first person camera) pick up an object (by hitting spacebar). The character could also drop the object at a new location (for example, by hitting spacebar).

Any ideas? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

2

the first thing you need to do is determine whether there’s anything to pick up. You can do this mathematically, but the easiest thing to do is to have a trigger collider directly in front of the player controller representing the area you can pick things up in. Your pickups should have either a particular script or a tag set so the pickerupper script knows that not everything with a rigidbody can be picked up.

Put a script on your picker-upper-trigger-collider that looks something like this:

var currentPickup : Rigidbody;
var holdingPosition : Transform; //a transform representing where the object will be held

function FixedUpdate() {
if (currentPickup) {
currentPickup.position = holdingPosition.position;
currentPickup.velocity = Vector3.zero; //without this, after holding it for a long time gravity would build up a huge amount of speed when you release
}
}

function OnTriggerStay(col : Collider) {
if (!currentPickup  col.gameObject.tag == "pickups"  Input.GetKeyDown("space")) {
currentPickup = col.attachedRigidbody;
}
}

(untested code; if it’s broken, fixing it is left as an exercise for the reader) :wink:

3

unless you want to see you are carrying said object (like a box or something)
you probably want to destroy the object you picked up,
log somewhere that you are now carrying the object,
then instantiate a new one when you drop it.

if you want to see the object while it’s carried, try making it semi-transparent on pick up – easiest way is to assign a new material.

Check out Destroy, and Instantiate. Read up on those as a starting point.

Manta’s advice is great too

4

Brian,

I like your advice about destroying the object to pick it up and then instantiating a new one to put it down, but how would I log somewhere that I am carrying the object?