So far (outside of somehow adding it into Godot via C++ myself) this doesn’t seem possible but wanted to ask to see if i maybe missed something.
The most i could find was this issue and a couple of related ones.
My specific use case would be for drawing bullet holes onto meshes (via decals). Ideally also being able to determine the texture used on the faces of the meshes that are intersected (to determine an appropriate decal to use).
Having everything that is possible to hit duplicated as a static body or area seems excessive to me. Since the only data required for ray intersection should be the transform of the meshes faces/edges/vertices etc which i would think are already contained in the mesh itself?
Failing being able to make intersecting a ray with meshes work i will probably try experimenting with using areas. They seem the lowest performance cost out of all the options the existing ray cast can detect. I would still end up with most of the games geometry being duplicated though, once as actual meshes and once as collisions for all the areas.
Alternatively if you get the mesh by using the collision shapes you can iterate on the mesh’s surfaces and use godot’s geometry class to check for intersection. If you get a reference to the mesh you can use get_faces method and Geometry class’s ray_intersects_triangle method. This is a very manual method and not very flexible regarding node setups. It is also not very performant.
Oh i guess this is exactly what i was asking for XD. Although im probably not going to try it since always needing to place the relevant meshes in the same places relative to the collider does seem like a pretty strict requirement like you said.