3D Mouse Picking for Bevy

A Bevy plugin for 3D mouse picking, making it easy to interact with 3D geometry using your mouse or any other ray casting source! The plugin includes built-in mouse events, highlighting, selection state, multi-window support, and a debug cursor, all of which are opt-in.

Expect breaking changes in master branch - contributions are welcome!

Features

• Multiple picking sources
  • Mouse (relative to supplied camera)
  • Screen space coordinates (relative to supplied camera)
  • Manually defined ray using a transform
• Pick Data
  • Pick depth
  • Pick coordinates (in world space)
  • Surface normal at the pick ray intersection
  • Vertex coordinates of the intersected triangle
• Mesh Interaction
  • Mouseover and click events
  • Configurable color highlighting for hovering and selection
  • Mesh selection state management
• 3D Debug cursor to show pick intersection and surface normal
• Picking Groups (associate a picking source with a set of meshes)
  • Multi window support

Demo

To run the 3d_scene example - a modified version of the Bevy example of the same name - clone this repository and run:

cargo run --example 3d_scene

Getting Started

It only takes a few lines to get mouse picking working in your Bevy application using this plugin; check out the 3d_scene example for a minimal implementation and demo! The following sections will walk you through what is needed to get the plugin working, and how everything fits together.

Setup

Add the plugin to your dependencies in Cargo.toml

bevy_mod_picking = "0.2.0"

Import the plugin:

use bevy_mod_picking::*;

Add it to your App::build() in the plugins section of your Bevy app:

.add_plugin(PickingPlugin)

Marking Entities for Picking

For simple use cases, you will probably be using the mouse to pick items in a 3d scene. You will can mark your camera with a default PickSource component:

.with(PickSource::default())

Now all you have to do is mark any mesh entities with the PickableMesh component:

.with(PickableMesh::default())

Interacting with Meshes

To get mouseover and mouseclick events, as well as built-in highlighting and selection state, you will need to add the InteractablePickingPlugin plugin. This is intentionally left optional, in case you only need pick intersection results.

// Add this below the PickingPlugin line
.add_plugin(InteractablePickingPlugin)

See the Pick Interactions section for more details on the features this provides. You will need to add the InteractableMesh component to entities to use these features.

.with(PickableMesh::default())
.with(InteractableMesh::default())

If you want a mesh to highlight when you hover, add the HighlightablePickMesh component:

// InteractableMesh component is a prerequisite for this to work
.with(HighlightablePickMesh::default())

If you also want to select meshes and keep them highlighted when clicked with the left mouse button, add the SelectablePickMesh component:

// InteractableMesh component is a prerequisite for this to work
.with(SelectablePickMesh::default())

Pick Groups

Pick groups allow you to associate meshes with a ray casting source, and produce a pick result for each group. For simple use cases, such as a single 3d view and camera, you can ignore this.

For those simple cases, you can just use Group::default() any time a Group is required. This will assign the PickableMesh or PickSource to picking group 0.

Pick groups are useful in cases such as multiple windows, where you want each window to have its own picking source (cursor relative to that window's camera), and each window might have a different set of meshes that this picking source can intersect. The primary window might assign the camera and all relavent meshes to pick group 0, while the secondary window uses pick group 1 for these. See the multiple_windows example for implementation details.

Constraints

• Only one PickSource can be assigned to a Group
• A PickableMesh can be assigned to one or more Groups
• The result of running the picking system is an ordered list of all intersections of each PickSource with the PickableMeshs in that Group. The ordered list of intersections are stored by Group, HashMap<Group, Vec<PickIntersection>>

Getting Pick Data

Pick Intersections Under the Cursor

Mesh picking intersection are reported in world coordinates. You can use the PickState resource to either get the topmost entity, or a list of all entities sorted by distance (near -> far) under the cursor:

fn get_picks(
    pick_state: Res<PickState>,
) {
    println!("All entities:\n{:?}", pick_state.list(Group::default()));
    println!("Top entity:\n{:?}", pick_state.top(Group::default()));
}

Alternatively, and perhaps more idiomatic to the Bevy ECS system, you can get the intersections for entities that have the PickableMesh component using:

pickable_entity.intersection(Group::default());

Pick Interactions

Run the events example to see mouseover and mouseclick events in action:

cargo run --example events

The InteractableMesh component stores mouseover event state, mouseclick event state (left, right, and middle buttons), and hover state.

Selection State

If you're using the SelectablePickMesh component for selection, you can access the selection state by querying your selectable entities and accessing the .selected() function.

Plugin Parameters

If you're using the built in HighlightablePickMash component for highlighting, you can change the colors by accessing the PickHighlightParams and setting the colors:

// Example Bevy system to set the highlight colors
fn set_highlight_params(
    mut highlight_params: ResMut<PickHighlightParams>,
) {
    highlight_params.set_hover_color(Color::rgb(1.0, 0.0, 0.0));
    highlight_params.set_selection_color(Color::rgb(1.0, 0.0, 1.0));
}

Debug

You can also enable a debug cursor that will place a sphere at the intersection, with a tail pointing normal to the surface. Just add the DebugPickingPlugin to the App::build() in your Bevy program:

.add_plugin(DebugPickingPlugin)

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in bevy_mod_picking by you, shall be licensed as MIT, without any additional terms or conditions.