Levers and Switches

In today’s blog post, we’ll be looking at triggering levers and switches using interactable events.

Setting up animations

We’re gonna tackle the light switches first. The first thing we need to do is to create animation clips for that represent the on and off states of the switch.

Off state

On state

Then we create an animator controller for the switch and create transitions between the two states.

To switch between the states, we need to add a bool parameter called “SwitchOn” which is set to false by default.

Transition from On to Off

Transition from Off to On

Now we’ve set up the animations for the light switches, we can repeat the process for the levers.

Adding triggers

Colliders

To be able to interact with switches and levers, we need to add a Box Collider (Is Trigger should be unchecked) and an XR Simple Interactable component.

Box Colliders for the switches

Box Colliders for the levers

Scripting

To trigger the switch/lever animations I’m gonna create a simple script called Controllers.

using UnityEngine;
public class Controllers : MonoBehaviour
{
   [SerializeField] private Animator _animator;
   public void ToggleSwitch()
   {
      bool currentSwitchState = _animator.GetBool("SwitchOn");
      _animator.SetBool("SwitchOn", !currentSwitchState);
   }
   
   public void ToggleLever()
   {
      bool currentLeverState = _animator.GetBool("LeverOn");
      _animator.SetBool("LeverOn", !currentLeverState);
   }
}

In this script, we get the reference to the Animator component and create two public functions to toggle the state of switches and levers.

When we’re done with the script, drop it into the switch and lever objects and assign the Animator component. Here’s an example of one of the light switches:

XR Simple Interactable

Now that we have everything we need, let’s configure this component to trigger the animations. Let’s start with a light switch!

Firstly, we drop the collider into the Colliders field. Next, I want to flip the switch when hovering over it so under the Hover Entered event, we reference the Controller script component for this switch and select the ToggleSwitch function.

I’m gonna repeat the process for the levers but will be using the Activate event instead of the Hover event.

Testing

After we finish setting up, things should work as expected.

Levers

Switches