I have met two serious limitations when using Scene Kit’s -[SCNSceneRenderer hitTest:options:] method:
- it is not sufficient to add a node to the scene for the hit test to find it. The scene must also have been rendered once.
- the method takes a long time. In my example, about 20 ms in a very simple scene which only contains a couple of spheres. Unfortunately, I had to do it 2000 times, so it takes 40 s ! Totally unusable in my case.
The method seems to have been designed for user interaction, and is only suitable for that case.
(I finally solved the problem by coding my own hit testing, which was possible because I work with a simple sphere. It was not easy because of the lack of information on what the matrix of the SCNCamera really contains, but I eventually managed to reduce the time from 40 s to a couple of milliseconds).