Triangle-Cube/Voxel Intersection - c++

What would be the best algorithm to detect whether a triangle intersects with a voxel/cube in 3D space? I have this source, written in C: http://tog.acm.org/resources/GraphicsGems/gemsiii/triangleCube.c . I was trying to refactor and convert this code to C++, but I realized that I really have no idea what is going on. Moreover, the comments state that the triangle intersection is compared with a unit cube, however I am unable to find a way to extend the algorithm to work with any arbitrary cube/voxel.
Is there a more clear implementation (preferably in C++) of detecting triangle-cube intersection? If not, what would be the best way for me to extend the C code to work with any arbitrary cube?
Thank you in advance

A simple algorithm would be to:
Calculate the plane on which the triangle lies.
Find the intersection between this plane and the cube (if any).
If there is no intersection then the problem is solved.
Otherwise, find the straight line which runs through each of the triangles edges.
For each line: If the intersection is on the "outside" then there is no intersection.
Otherwise there is an intersection.
If your criteria for the "best" algorithm is simplicity, then this would be a good one. If your looking for performance, there are probably some faster ones out there.
You could also try looking at the code hosted at:
http://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/cs/Personal/Tomas_Akenine-Moller/code/

Related

How to mesh a 2D point cloud in C++

I have a set of 2D points of a known density I want to mesh by taking the holes in account. Basically, given the following input:
I want something link this:
I tried PCL ConcaveHull, but it doens't handle the holes and splitted mesh very well.
I looked at CGAL Alpha shapes, which seems to go in the right direction (creating a polygon from a point cloud), but I don't know how to get triangles after that.
I though of passing the resulting polygons to a constrained triangulation algorithm and mark domains, but I didn't find how to get a list of polygons.
The resulting triangulated polygon is about a two step process at the least. First you need to triangulate your 2D points (using something like a Delaunay2D algorithm). There you can set the maximum length for the triangles and get the the desired shape. Then you can decimate the point cloud and re-triangulate. Another option is to use the convex hull to get the outside polygon, then extract the inside polygon through a TriangulationCDT algorithm, the apply some PolygonBooleanOperations, obtain the desired polygon, and finaly re-triangulate.
I suggest you look into the Geometric Tools library and specifically the Geometric Samples. I think everything you need is in there, and is much less library and path heavy than CGAL (the algorithms are not free for this type of work unless is a school project) or the PCL (I really like the library for segmentation, but their triangulation breaks often and is slow).
If this solves your problem, please mark it as your answer. Thank you!

2D-Visibility/Light - Efficient Polygon-Ray intersection

Im trying to write a game in 2D with Sfml. For that game i need a Lightengine and some code that can give me the area of the world that is visible to the player. AS both problems fit very well together (are pratically the same) i would like to solve both problems at once.
My world will be loaded from files in which the hitboxes of objects will be represented as Polygons.
I now wrote some code that takes a list of Polygons and the Direction of a Ray that follows the mouse and finds the closest intersection with any of these polygons.
The next step now would be to cast rays from the players or lights Position towards the edges of the polygons, aswell rays offset by +-0.000001 radians to determine the visible area and give it back as a polygon.
The Problem though is that my algorithm (it calculates the inersection between two lines with vector mathematics) is too slow.
In my very good PC i get 100fps with 300 egdes and one Ray.
I now read many articles online but couldnt find one best solution. But as far as i read it should be much faster to calculate intersections with triangles.
My question now: would it be meaningly faster to triangulate the polygons once while loading the map and then use ray-triangle intersection or is there any better way that you know of to solve my problem?
I also heard of bounding Volumen hierachies but i dont know howmuch impact that would have.
Im a bit surprised of how much power my algorithm consumes, as it only has to calculate some 2 dimensional intersections...
For everyone looking for the solution I finally went with:
I discovered the Box2D Physics Engine and I am now using the b2World::RayCast(...) function to determine whether and where a ray hits an object in my scene.
For now everything works fine and smooth (did no exact benchmark yet) :)
http://www.iforce2d.net/b2dtut/world-querying
I got it to work with the help of this site
Have a nice Day! :)

How to get curve from intersection of point cloud and arbitrary plane?

I have various point clouds defining RT-STRUCTs called ROI from DICOM files. DICOM files are formed by tomographic scanners. Each ROI is formed by point cloud and it represents some 3D object.
The goal is to get 2D curve which is formed by plane, cutting ROI's cloud point. The problem is that I can't just use points which were intersected by plane. What I probably need is to intersect 3D concave hull with some plane and get resulting intersection contour.
Is there any libraries which have already implemented these operations? I've found PCL library and probably it should be able to solve my problem, but I can't figure out how to achieve it with PCL. In addition I can use Matlab as well - we use it through its runtime from C++.
Has anyone stumbled with this problem already?
P.S. As I've mentioned above, I need to use a solution from my C++ code - so it should be some library or matlab solution which I'll use through Matlab Runtime.
P.P.S. Accuracy in such kind of calculations is really important - it will be used in a medical software intended for work with brain tumors, so you can imagine consequences of an error (:
You first need to form a surface from the point set.
If it's possible to pick a 2d direction for the points (ie they form a convexhull in one view) you can use a simple 2D Delaunay triangluation in those 2 coordinates.
otherwise you need a full 3D surfacing function (marching cubes or Poisson)
Then once you have the triangles it's simple to calculate the contour line that a plane cuts them.
See links in Mesh generation from points with x, y and z coordinates
Perhaps you could just discard the points that are far from the plane and project the remaining ones onto the plane. You'll still need to reconstruct the curve in the plane but there are several good methods for that. See for instance http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~tamaldey/curverecon.htm and http://valis.cs.uiuc.edu/~sariel/research/CG/applets/Crust/Crust.html.

How to form Concave shapes from convex pieces Confusion

Hey so i was told in a previous answer that to make concave shapes out of multiple convex ones i do the following:
If you don't have a convex hull, perform a package wrapping algorithm
to get a convex border that encompasses all your points (again quite
fast). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_wrapping_algorithm
Choose a point that is on the boarder as a starter point for the algorithm.
Now, itterate through the following points that are on your shape,
but aren't on the convex border.
When one is found, create a new shape with the vertices from
the starter point to the found non-border point.
Finally set the starter point to be the the found off-border point
Recursion is now your friend: do the exact same process on each new
sub-shape you make.
I'm confused on one thing though. What do you do when two vertices in a row are off-border? After reaching the first one you connect the starter point to it, but then you immediatly run into another off-border point after you start itterating again, leaving you with only 2 vertices to work with: the starter point and new off-border point. What am i missing?
To illustrate my problem, here's a shape pertaining to this issue: It would be great if someone could draw all over it and walk through the steps of the algorithm using this. And using point 1 as the starting point.
Thanks!
Assuming you really want to take a convex polygon (as you've illustrated) and decompose it into convex parts without introducing new vertices, the usual approach is called "ear clipping" and is described in this Wikipedia article, Polygon triangulation. In this approach the convex pieces are triangles, which are necessarily convex.
This problem has been discussed in connection with the CGAL computational geometry software here in Stackoverflow, C++ 2D tessellation library.

GJK collision detection implementation from 2D to 3D

I apologize for the length of this question and give a pre-emptive thanks for anyone who reads through this!
So i've spent the last few days going over the GJK algorithm. I understand the general concepts behind it, and understand the most of the nitty gritties of its implementation in 2D thanks to the wonderful article by William Bittle at http://www.codezealot.org/archives/88 .
I've implemented his pseudo code (found at the end of the article) into my own c++ project, however i want to make a 3D implementation. My weakness comes into using the dot products to test the voronoi regions and the tripleProducts to get perpandicular lines. But im trying to read up more on that.
My problem comes down to the containsOrigin function. Im having trouble visualizing and accounting for the new voronoi regions that the z axis adds. I just can't seem to wrap my head around how to determine which regions contains the origin. I assume there is 4 I have to account for, each extending from the triangular planes that the comprise the 4 faces of the tetrahedron simplex. If the origin is not within any of those regions, then it is contained, and we have a collision.
How do i go about testing if it is contained in a particular voronoi region/ which triangular face is pointing in the direction of the origin?
The current 2D algorithm checks if a triangle is made, if not, then the simplex is a line and it finds the 3rd point. I assume the 3D algorithm with check if a tetrahedron is made, if not, then it will check for a triangle, if true then it will to find a 4th point to make a tetrahedron(how would i get this? using a normal in direction of origin?). If i trangle isnt made, it will find a 3rd point to make a triangle (do i still use triple product for this like in 2D?).
Any suggestions, outlines, resources, code augmentations, comments are much appretiated.
Depending on what result you expect from the GJK algorithm you might want to look at this nice tutorial from Molly Rocket: https://mollyrocket.com/849
Be aware though that his implementation only outputs intersection? yes/no. But it might be a nice start.