How to detect that my object is completely inside a box?

Question

I'm developing a game that you drag and drop objects into boxes and I have no idea what's the best and most efficient way to detect whether my objects are in a box.

I'm well aware of colliders and I'm using BoxColliders and triggers to find out whether my object is touching a box but I want to detect the moment when my object (which we can assume to be sphere for sake of simplicity but later will be a mesh) is completely inside my box trigger/collider.

I read about "Contains" method of colliders but IIRC they just check if one single point inside that collider but I'm interested to know if the whole object is inside the collider.

Thanks in advance folks.

Answer 1

Short answer: If you want 100% accuracy, your algorithm will never be better than O(|V|) (worst case) where V = {all vertices in mesh}, meaning you'd run .Collides() over every vertex and break if you find one that is outside your container.

Longer answer: Several methods exist to subdivide mesh surfaces, examples include: KD-Trees, OcTrees. These are beyond the scope of an SO answer to provide a full implementation, I suggest you see the wiki pages for details.

You could use these methods to divide your mesh up in to smaller sets of vertices. To speed up your algorithm you would start at the root of your subdivision tree and test if that node is contained in your container box. Keep working through the tree until you find a node that is not contained by your box. This will allow your "contains" test to fail faster but ultimately you'll wind up testing every vertex if your box contains your mesh.

Caveat: This solution does not work if your mesh is animated. In that case your best bet is to use the bounds around things like arms, feet, legs, etc and use that information to cull your Contains() tests. Again, you'll end up having to test every vertex if the mesh is fully inside your box.