Question regarding Raycast hitting UI button object instead of gameobject

Hello everyone.

I am having trouble having my raycast detect a button object and sending a mouse click to it. My goal is to have the button call and play a specific animation on mouseclickup but only doing this when clicking on the button. The button object has an animator with all of the animations I need.

This is my current code for the first button:

void Update() { if (Input.GetMouseButtonUp(0)) { CheckRaycast();

     }

}

void CheckRaycast() { Ray ray = Camera.main.ScreenPointToRay(Input.mousePosition); RaycastHit hit;

     if (Physics.Raycast(ray, out hit, 1000f))
     {
         if (hit.transform != null)
         {

             if (hit.transform)
             {
                 Click.Play();
             }

             if (hit.transform.tag == "B1Tag" && B1 == 1)
             {
                 Button1.GetComponent<Animator>().Play("G2R-Middle");
                 B1++;
                 B2++;
                 B4++;
                 clickcounter++;
             }

The button1 is a public gameobject and also has the B1Tag on it.

The only thing I can think of, is the game camera is being used and it doesn't detect UI objects.

Is there a different way to make this work?

In order, I want button down to disable the animator for that object and show the sprite(button clicked/pressed) then after release(buttonup) it plays the requested animation, following a condition.

It works without a raycast, but I only want it to work for the clicked object.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.