Item Mouse Over

Hey guys,

We're trying to implement items for our game that will glow when moused over. Now, we have a couple of problems.

First, I was able to get item selection to work by using ray casting on a mouse click. Well, kinda. The selection recognizes the health kit and health patch models, but as soon as I start using an item I created (a key), it will no longer recognize the item. My key has a single collision node and 3 LOD levels, and the player will run into it normally when it is instantiated as a collidable mesh. Is there a certain way to set up my .dts so that it will be recognized by the item selection? Here's the selection code I'm using:

// Finds an interactable object in the game world that corresponds to the
// current mouse position on screen.
function PlayGui::onMouseDown(%this, %pos, %start, %ray)
{
   
   // Find the end of the search vector.
   %ray = VectorScale(%ray, $pickLen);
   %end = VectorAdd(%start, %ray);

   // Only care about interactable objects.
   %searchMasks = $TypeMasks::ItemObjectType;

   // Search for any interactable objects along the ray.
   %scanTarg = ContainerRayCast(%start, %end, %searchMasks);
   echo("-------- Left mouse buttom down: " @ %scanTarg);

   // Access the found object.
   if(%scanTarg)
   {
      %target = firstWord(%scanTarg);

      // Make sure that the object is interactable.
      echo("Found interactable item!");
      %target.doMouseOver(0);
   }
}

Second, we wanted to have the items glow as the user moused over them, but we can't seem to find a convenient way to do that. Is there way for an item to access its materials, and can we do that without making everything using the same material glow as well? So far our back-up idea is to do essentially the same thing with item switching - just switch to a different item (or different material for the item) that has the glow effect enabled, but it would be nice if we could just access that aspect of the material directly from the Item or ItemData datablocks.

Thanks for any help or ideas you can give us!