Shapes: Cylinder, Capsule, Disk, Box, Sphere, Compound

Add shape components to entities that have other components that require shapes.

For example, add shape components to your entities to create volumes for the following:

• Create a trigger volume using the** Trigger Area** component. Entities that enter the volume trigger an action.
• Create a collision volume using the PhysX Collider component. Entities that collide with the collision volume respond to the impact, such as slowing down or bouncing back.
• Define reverb or echo effects using the Audio Environment component.
• Create an audio area using the Audio Trigger component so that a specific sound plays in that area of the level.

Note
You can add only one shape component to an entity. If you need more than one shape on an entity, create child entities.

Each shape component provides a generic ShapeService that exposes functionality common to all shapes. Each shape also provides a more specific service, such as BoxShapeService or SphereShapeService.

The Shape component includes the following shapes and properties:

Topics

• Scaling Shapes
• Box Shape Component Properties
• Capsule Shape Component Properties
• Compound Shape Component Properties
• Cylinder Shape Component Properties
• Disk Shape Component Properties
• Sphere Shape Component Properties
• Request EBus Interface

Scaling Shapes

As a best practice, when you scale a shape, adjust the shape component’s properties, such as its Dimensions, Height, and Radius.

Tip
Modify the shape component’s properties instead using the Scale tool, which changes the entity’s Transform component.

Example
See the following examples for the different scaling:

1. In nonuniform scaling, adjusting an entity’s transform scale leads to different values for X, Y, and Z.

2. In uniform scaling, X, Y, and Z have the same value.

3. In uniform normalized scaling, all of the scale values are 1.

If an entity has been scaled nonuniformly, rendering and intersection tests use the largest component of the scale vector. Although this can work, the best practice is to keep a uniform and, ideally, normalized (1, 1, 1) transform scale, as shown in the third example.

Box Shape Component Properties

The Box Shape component has the following properties.

The Box Shape component also has its own Component Mode with several linear manipulators for each axis.

Capsule Shape Component Properties

The Capsule Shapecomponent has the following properties.

Compound Shape Component Properties

With the Compound Shape component, you can combine shapes to create a complex object to generate a physics collider, trigger shape, or any other application of shapes. The individual shapes might or might not be children of the entity with the Compound Shape component.

Note
To move the shapes together with the compound shape, set them as child entities. To move the shapes independent of the entity with the compound shape, don’t set them as child entities. For EBus (event bus) requests, compound shapes service the full shape component bus. However, each individual shape that you add increases the cost of requests such as IsPointInside.

See the following Compound Shape properties.

Cylinder Shape Component Properties

The Cylinder Shape component has the following properties.

Disk Shape Component Properties

See the following Disk Shape properties.

Sphere Shape Component Properties

See the following Sphere Shape properties.

Request EBus Interface

All shape components provide access to two separate request buses. The first bus is the ShapeComponentRequestsBus that returns general information about the shape component. The second bus is the ShapeNameComponentRequestsBus that returns property configurations for the specified shape.

Use the following request functions with the event bus interface to communicate with other components in your game.

For more information, see Working with the Event Bus (EBus) system.

ShapeComponentRequestsBus

The following table describes the ShapeComponentRequestsBus.

ComponentRequestsBus

Each shape component has its own specific event bus for accessing that particular shape. The buses have similar functions and only differ for the requested shape type.

BoxShapeComponentRequestsBus

CapsuleShapeComponentRequestsBus

CompoundShapeComponentRequestsBus

CylinderShapeComponentRequestsBus

SphereShapeComponentRequestsBus

ShapeComponentNotificationsBus

All shapes share a single notification bus named ShapeComponentNotificationsBus.