How to check for mesh overlap?

Question

I'm creating a level editor in Unity. I need to detect when an object is intersecting another as I don't want to allow the user to place an object when it is colliding with something else.

In the below diagam, there is a corner road piece and a tree. The dashed red line represents the mesh bounds of the road and the blue dashed line represents the mesh bounds of the tree.

My current approach is to use Physics.OverlapBox with mesh.bounds. In the diagram, visually, it is clear that the tree does not overlap the road. However, the bounds do overlap, therefore I cannot place the tree there.

Whats the best way to check if they are actually colliding in an efficient way? The level editor could potentially have thousands of objects.

EDIT: I have since tried using Physics.ComputePenetration. Primitive-primitive checks work ok, primitive-mesh collider checks work ok, but mesh collider-mesh collider checks fail. From what I understand a concave mesh collider cannot interact with another concave mesh collider. Is there a workaround for this or must I momentarily make it convex before checking overlap? I just don't want to lose the accuracy of the concave collider.

Answer 1

To solve this I first use Physics.OverlapSphere to get the nearby colldiers. Then for a more precise calculation I use Physics.ComputePenetration.

However, some of my assets utilize concave mesh colliders. As stated in the docs, a concave mesh collider cannot collide with another concave mesh collider. To fix this, I momentarily make the mesh collider concave before calling the overlap sphere.