How to visualize raycasts done in scripts?

Help & Support
1

Q: Is there any way to visualize raycasts?

Answer:

To visualize a raycast, you would need to draw a debug line.

Today it is possible to draw a debug line in a script but not through the Livelink.js SDK. As a reminder, scripts are written in C++ and run server-side (directly alongside the rendering engine). They have access to functions within our rendering engine like drawDebugLine.

Within the custom code node of a script, you can use the function:

void engine_context::drawDebugLine(const glm::vec3 &start, const glm::vec3 &end, line_color color);

The different line_colors available to you are as follows:

enum class line_color : uint32_t
{
    white = 0x00FFFFFF,
    red = 0x000000FF,
    green = 0x0000FF00,
    blue = 0x00FF0000,
    yellow = 0x0000FFFF,
    magenta = 0x00FF00FF,
    cyan = 0x00FFFF00
};

So, in your custom code, you would visualize a raycast like so:

// Raycast
const auto optRaycastResult = g_pEngineContext->physicsRaycast(rayOrigin, moveDir, rayLength, ftl_query_filter_flag::static_block);
// Draw raycast
g_pEngineContext->drawDebugLine(rayOrigin, rayOrigin + moveDir * rayLength, line_color::magenta);

g_pEngineContext is a pointer to the engine_context (which holds engine functions like engine_context::physicsRaycast and engine_context::drawDebugLine) that is globally defined and can be used by any custom code node.