Why is Mesh Collider only visible in the Scene View when the Renderer is disabled?

Unity Engine
1

This constantly trips me up, and makes me think something is broken, especially given how inconsistent this is with other kinds of colliders.

It seems to be the intent that if you select an object with both a Mesh Renderer and a Mesh Collider, you will only see the green lines of the collider if you first disable the render. For example, here a passage in a wall is selected:

9895551--1428753--upload_2024-6-18_15-33-21.png
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And now, if I disable its render, I can see its collider:

9895551--1428756--upload_2024-6-18_15-33-51.png
9895551--1428756--upload_2024-6-18_15-33-51.png720×519 316 KB

This is completely different to primitives, with Cube Colliders, Sphere Colliders, and Capsule colliders, which are always visible when the object is selected:

9895551--1428759--upload_2024-6-18_15-35-19.png

Can I change something to make the collider always visible? This is the sort of behavior that I have to keep re-learning every year or so when I forget it, panic that something’s broken, and have to search again to realize it’s just a design inconsistency.

(And to dodge any initial criticism: Yes, most of the time my mesh colliders use lower-res version of my renderer’s mesh, and its own renderer is disable, and this isn’t a problem. But there are plenty of times with simpler models that using the same mesh for the render and the collider is fine.)

2

Did you check the scene view’s component selection dropdown? Maybe you have to manually enable MeshColliders. I do remember this has been mentioned before but can’t recall the solution.

I don’t quite understand this but maybe the behaviour is simply that if Mesh and MeshCollider are identical meshes it wouldn’t make sense to display both? The way you phrase it it sounds like this is what you observed and if so, it would actually make sense.

3

That’s also my theory on why it’s like this, and it makes some sense. But it’s still a confusing behavior when you’re asking the question, “Where did the mesh collider go?” I guess this is the sort of thing it would be nice if it were optional. So probably we’re in “feature request” land now.