Curved NavMeshAgent Paths | AI Series Part 35

NavMeshAgents typically move linearly between a set of points calculated by the Navigation System using NavMesh.CalculatePath() under the hood, or directly by your code. In this tutorial we'll look at how we can smooth that path to add some variance into our NavMeshAgents' paths.

To do this we'll first need to understand how Bezier Curves work. That's covered in more depth in another video I've done recently:

Smoothing Lines using Bezier Curves: https://youtu.be/u0yZb1xIyLA

Assuming you have some knowledge of how those work, we'll use a Bezier Curve to smooth out the path the Agent's path and apply some configurable path postprocessing to remove noise, ensure the agent is going in the right direction.

One question I expect may come up (because that's what I tried to do in the first place and it doesn't work ;)) but I didn't add a section in the video for:

Q: Why not just create a NavMeshPath with the smoothed corners and do NavMeshAgent.SetPath(smoothedPath)

A: You cannot modify the corners property of the NavMeshPath. The NavMeshPath must be calculated by the Navigation System itself. All properties are read only: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AI.NavMeshPath.html

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As usual with the AI Series, we're using the NavMesh Components: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/NavMesh-BuildingComponents.html not the built-in navigation system.

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