Raycaster intersects with invisible objects

There is one old problem for me, but still I can’t find same issue in task tracker.

Have a look at this line: https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/a1daef37e5a6b80d0173af54edd000202b95fca5/src/core/Raycaster.js#L46 Why Raycaster checks visible property only on intersectable’s object? I mean, if I set visible = false in parent, children become invisible for renderer, but still intersectable. Should Raycaster check nearest parents until find invisible? I have to check result of intersection for invisible parents in every single project. Is it any reason for not checking parents here?

My code:

var bool;
THREE.Object3D.prototype.isVisible = function() {
    bool = true;
    this.traverseAncestors((parent) => {
        if (!parent.visible) bool = false;
    });
    return bool;
};

[Mugen87]

I suggest to remove the test on Object3D.visible and add a test based on Layers instead. This idea was already suggested here https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/7551#issuecomment-154400499 and it would be similar to how raycasting works in Unity. In this way, we decouple the raycast from the visibility of the object but still allow to filter out unwanted objects. Something like this in intersectObject() might work:

function intersectObject( object, raycaster, intersects, recursive ) {

        if ( object.layers.test( raycaster.layers ) ) { 

            object.raycast( raycaster, intersects );

        }

	if ( recursive === true ) {

		var children = object.children;

		for ( var i = 0, l = children.length; i < l; i ++ ) {

			intersectObject( children[ i ], raycaster, intersects, true );

		}

	}

}

Notice that children would still be tested even if the layer test evaluates to false for the current object. In this way, layers in Raycaster are treated similar like in WebGLRenderer. Unfortunately, this change might break user code so it’s problematic to get it into the library…

[themightyatom]

Alternative strategy! (for anyone having similar issues)

It’s worth remembering that you send an array of objects to Raycaster in the first place, and in this array you can easily weed out the objects you don’t want in the Raycast operation. That’s always been my strategy, and never had any problems.