Mouse Tips And Tricks

Mouse Utilities

The script below provided the following functionalities:

• Project a ray from the camera through the mouse cursor and gets the location of where the ray intersects a plane specified by the user.

• Gets the position of the mouse in the world. This must be supplied a depth value since the mouse exists on the X, Y plane of the screen

MouseUtilities.cs

using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.InputSystem;

public static class MouseUtilities
{
    // Projects a ray from the camera through the mouse cursor.
    // Gets the position of the raycast that intersects with the given plane.
    public static Vector3 GetMousePositionOnPlane(Plane plane)
    {
        Ray ray = Camera.main.ScreenPointToRay(Mouse.current.position.ReadValue());
        // Plane.Raycast stores the distance from ray.origin to the hit point in this variable:
        float distance = 0;
        // if the ray hits the plane...
        if (plane.Raycast(ray, out distance))
        {
            // get the hit point:
            return ray.GetPoint(distance);
        }
        else
        {
            // Return Zero if no intersection occurs
            return Vector3.zero;
        }
    }

    // Gets the position of the mouse in the world. Must be supplied a depth value
    // since the mouse exists only on the x,y plane of the screen.
    public static Vector3 GetMouseWorldPosition(float depth)
    {
        Vector3 mousePosition = Mouse.current.position.ReadValue();
        mousePosition.z = depth;
        return Camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint(mousePosition);
    }
}