Is there a rigidbody character controller 3rd person that can handel stairs (steps)?

Ok,

My solution was.... using a Character Controller and a collider without a rigidbody. (I realise this breaks my own rule about not using a Character controller).

Initally I wrote a script and attached it to the character to check for stairs using a ray cast down to the ground and one out at 45 degrees to the character front and when the front raycast distance was below the hypotenuse of that triangle (square root of (2)) it would detect a step. I also needed to include logic that if that distance was too short then it was detecting a wall or another character. I then ran into the problem of what to do when a step was detected. I ended up going with if the character had forward speed determined by the path finder meaning it should be going forward then I also applied some upward force. This sort of worked but didn't look very pretty because the character would jump up a little bit every time it approached an obsticle.

I went back to the Character controller because it does handel steps nicely even if I have no idea how it is doing it. I added a collider and a rigidbody but this caused all kinds of isses with the object 'freaking out' due to weird physics conflicts. After much tweeking I realised that a fat collider on the gameobject containing the Character controller will act like a collider with a rigidbody attached even if it doesn't have a rigidbody attached. Thus it will push other colliders out of the way (which is what I needed).

So the combination of the Character Controller and collider seems to achieve the goal of pushing objects out of the path and allows the character to step up stains that it wouldnt' be able to with just a rigidbody and collider.

See Picture:

It still would be nice to know how the Character Contoller handles stairs/steps so, if needed, I could apply it to the rigidbody and collider.

Its a bit of an oversight that the Character Controller doesn't have a tick box to allow collisions / physics because that would negate the use of the extra (redundant) collider. Its also worth noting that if the collider doesn't peak out above the Character controller capsule significantly it won't work in terms of pushing correctly.

Unity can solve this by adding those tick boxes to allow the Character Controller capsule to act like a proper push collider and a tick box for using its version of physics such as gravity / trigger / kinematic etc.

--------------------------------------------------EDIT see comment 1

Attaching colliders had the problem that only one collider could push the character controller. Thus two identical characters could not be setup in such a way that the attached collider could push the CC.

Thus, I had to change the sphere collider attached to the CC into a trigger and attach the following script to get the push behaviour I needed. Its not perfect but it works the CC will now push each other around to make way for each other during pathing.

 using System.Collections;
 using System.Collections.Generic;
 using UnityEngine;
 
 public class CCpush : MonoBehaviour {
 
     public float pushMultiplier = 0.5f;
 
     public void OnTriggerStay(Collider col) {
 
         // Ensure this is not called on itself due to interal trigger collision with CC
         if (col.gameObject != this.gameObject) {
         
             CharacterController ctrl = col.gameObject.GetComponent (typeof(CharacterController)) as CharacterController;
             if (ctrl) {
                 // move the second character in the direction of travel but at a slow speed.
                 ctrl.SimpleMove (this.gameObject.transform.forward * pushMultiplier);
             }
         }
     }
 }