Detect if an Actor is partially hidden

[RLord321]

I’m trying to find the best view of an actor on the screen. If there is a tree on the level and it’s current covering up the actor, I would like the camera to rotate around the tree. Rotation is easy, but I don’t know how to detect if something is in the way of the actor from a visibility standpoint.

[Everynone]

You will need a form of tracing. What kind to choose will depend on the object you’re tracing against. Here’s a sphere trace:

This fires a beam from the camera as wide as the object’s mesh, if the beam intersects with anything blocking Visibility, we can detect that.

[Everynone]

If the target actor does not fit into a sphere neatly enough, a sphere trace could end up inaccurate; in that case you could box trace instead:

This projects a rotated box instead:

This is not a complete setup, more of a proof of concept. Certain aspect are simplified here and assumptions were made. But that’s the gist.

Hope it helps.