Have been working on the third-person parkour system and wanted to describe some of the implementation details in it. The particular challenge I was wrestling with was the "animation doesn't match geometry" issue that is common for such systems.
The way I ended up solving it was by creating a three-stage evaluation system.
First,
there is a detection stage that uses two raycasts per obstacle to detect. One raycast checks for obstacles in front of the character, and another one below the hit position from the first raycast to find horizontal surfaces. This way, with two raycasts, I get both "is there an obstacle in front of me" and "how high is it".
Second,
a decision-making stage, which for each of the available parkour moves (step-up, vault, climb, fence-hop) has a range of heights it can be used on, an optional tag requirement (to climb on specific walls), and an animation to play. Then, for a given situation, it simply goes through all the moves until it finds the applicable one. And when a new move needs to be added, I just have to create a new ScriptableObject, not touch any code.
And finally,
the correction animation. This part I think is neat because it uses Animator.MatchTarget to make animations for climb moves, which are typically used for ledges of specific heights, work on varying ledge heights. It works by having a target hand position at the end of the animation curve, which is then overwritten by MatchTarget to be the position of the hand on the obstacle that was detected in the first stage. And because the correction targets the individual body parts (hands or feet), it allows for much better movement without the feet or hands sliding through the geometry.
I also implemented a ladder climbing system using the same design pattern, as it fits really well when there is a need to have custom logic during the movement play (in this case, climbing up/down a ladder) and then return to the regular Animator control.
Repo (full source, MIT licensed): https://github.com/prototypesDeprakash/ThirdPerson_ParkourSystem_with_TargetMatching
Happy to answer questions about the raycast setup, the ScriptableObject action pattern, or the target matching tuning (start/end time windows, weight masks) if anyone's fighting similar issues.