If all you want is for enemies to stop rotating when they are looking at the player, I would consider just checking the direction between them, as it's a lot faster than casting a ray to see if it intersects:
// Assuming `enemy` is a THREE.Mesh
var targetDir = enemy.position.clone().sub(player.position).normalize();
var currentDir = (new THREE.Vector3()).applyMatrix4(enemy.matrixWorld).sub(enemy.position).normalize();
var amountToRotate = currentDir.sub(targetDir);
var offset = amountToRotate.length();
Then rotate each axis no more than the value for that axis in amountToRotate
if offset
is greater than some threshold.
That said, here is how you use a Raycaster, given the variables above:
var raycaster = new THREE.Raycaster(enemy.position, targetDir);
var intersections = raycaster.intersectObject(player);
Note that if you are running any of the above code in an animation loop, it will create a lot of garbage collection churn because you are constantly creating a bunch of new objects and then immediately throwing them away. A better pattern, which is used a lot in the library itself, is to initialize objects once, copy values to them if you need to, and then use those copies for computation. For example, you could create a function to do your raycasting for you like this:
var isEnemyLookingAtPlayer = (function() {
var raycaster = new THREE.Raycaster();
var pos = new THREE.Vector3();
return function(enemy) {
raycaster.ray.origin.copy(enemy.position);
raycaster.ray.direction.copy(pos.copy(enemy.position).sub(player.position).normalize());
return !!raycaster.intersectObject(player).length;
};
})();