Algorithm to calculate and display a ribbon on a 3D triangle mesh - graphics

I am looking for an algorithm for the following problem:
Given:
A 3D triangle mesh. The mesh represents a part of the surface of the earth.
A polyline (a connected series of line segments) whose vertices are always on an edge or on a vertex of a triangle of the mesh. The polyline represents the centerline of a road on the surface of the earth.
I need to calculate and display the road i.e. add half of the road's width on each side of the center line, calculate the resulting vertices in the corresponding triangles of the mesh, fill the area of the road and outline the sides of the road.
What is the simplest and/or most effective strategy to do this? How do I store the data of the road most efficiently?

I see 2 options here:
render thick polyline with road texture
While rendering polyline you need TBN matrix so use
polyline tangent as tangent
surface normal as normal
binormal=tangent x normal
shift actual point p position to
p0=p+d*binormal
p1=p-d*binormal
and render textured line (p0,p1). This approach is not precise match to surface mesh so you need to disable depth or use some sort of blending. Also on sharp turns it could miss some parts of a curve (in that case you can render rectangle or disc instead of line.
create the mesh by shifting polyline to sides by half road size
This produces mesh accurate road fit, but due to your limitations the shape of the road can be very distorted without mesh re-triangulation in some cases. I see it like this:
for each segment of road cast 2 lines shifted by half of road size (green,brown)
find their intersection (aqua dots) with shared edge of mesh with the current road control point (red dot)
obtain the average point (magenta dot) from the intersections and use that as road mesh vertex. In case one of the point is outside shared mesh ignore it. In case both intersections are outside shared edge find closest intersection with different edge.
As you can see this can lead to serious road thickness distortions in some cases (big differences between intersection points, or one of the intersection points is outside surface mesh edge).
If you need accurate road thickness then use the intersection of the casted lines as a road control point instead. To make it possible either use blending or disabling Depth while rendering or add this point to mesh of the surface by re-triangulating the surface mesh. Of coarse such action will also affect the road mesh and you need to iterate few times ...
Another way is use of blended texture for road (like sprites) and compute the texture coordinate for the control points. If the road is too thick then thin it by shifting the texture coordinate ... To make this work you need to select the most far intersection point instead of average ... Compute the real half size of the road and from that compute texture coordinate.
If you get rid of the limitation (for road mesh) that road vertex points are at surface mesh segments or vertexes then you can simply use the intersection of shifted lines alone. That will get rid of the thickness artifacts and simplify things a lot.

Related

Circle triangulation

I am currently experimenting with openGL, and I'm drawing a lot of circles that I have to break down to triangles (triangulate a circle).
I've been calculating the vertices of the triangles by having an angle that is incremented, and using cos() and sin() to get the x and y values for one vertex.
I searched a bit on the internet about the best and most efficient way of doing this, and even though there's not much information avaliable realized that thin and long triangles (my approach) are not very good. A better approach would be to start with an equilateral triangle and then repeatedly add triangles that cover the larges possible area that's not yet covered.
left - my method; right - new method
I am wondering if this is the most efficient way of doing this, and if yes, how would that be implemented in actual code.
The website where I found the method: link
both triangulations has their pros and cons
The Triangle FAN has equal sized triangles which sometimes looks better with textures (and other interpolated stuff) and the code to generate is simple for loop with parametric circle equation.
The increasing detail mesh has less triangles and can easily support LOD which might be faster. However number of points is not arbitrary (3,6,12,24,48,...). The code is slightly more complicated you could:
start with equilateral triangle remembering circumference edges
so add triangle (p0,p1,p2) to mesh and edges (p0,p1),(p1,p2),(p2,p0) to circumference.
for each edge (p0,p1) of circumference
compute:
p2 = 0.5*(p0+p1); // mid point
p2 = r*p2/|p2|; // normalize it to circle circumference assuming (0,0) is center
add triangle (p0,p1,p2) to mesh and replace p0,p1 edge with (p0,p2),(p2,p1) edges
note that r/|p2| will be the same for all edges in current detail level so no need to compute expensive |p2| over and over again.
goto #2 until you have enough dense triangulation
so 2 for loops and few dynamic lists (points,triangles,circumference_edges,and some temps if not doing this inplace). Also this method does not need goniometrics at all (can be modified to generate the triangle fan too).
Here similar stuff:
sphere triangulation using similar technique

Getting edge points from a 3D model (mesh)

I want to find the sharp edges of any given mesh. For reference, here is a mesh of a chair:
It's clear that the border of the back of the chair is an edge, as are the four curves that outline the arms and legs, etc.
I would like to sample points along these edges. Is there a known algorithm for doing this?
Couple approaches I thought of:
Triangle edge detection
Consider every pair of connected points in the mesh. Each of these segments should be part of two triangles. If the angle between the surface normals of the two triangles is wide enough, that segment should be considered an edge.
Point cloud edge detection
With open3d, I can easily convert the mesh into a point cloud, where each point has a surface normal. I could potentially search the point cloud for sudden changes in the surface normals. Though I think that could get fairly complex, as I'd have to find the nearest neighbors of every point.

Generating density map for tree growth rings

I was just wondering if someone know of any papers or resources on generating synthetic images of growth rings in trees. Im thinking 2d scalar-fields or some other data representation which can then be used to render growth rings like images :)
Thanks!
never done or heard about this ...
If you need simulation then search for biology/botanist sites instead.
If you need just visually close results then I would:
make a polygon covering the cut (circle/oval like shape)
start with circle and when all working try to add some random distortion or use ellipse
create 1D texture with the density
it will be used to fill the polygon via triangle fan. So first find an image of the tree type you want to generate for example this:
Analyze the color and intensity as a function of diameter so extract a pie like piece (or a thin rectangle)
and plot a graph of R,G,B values to see how the rings are shaped
then create function that approximate that (or use piecewise interpolation) and create your own texture as function of tree age. You can interpolate in this way booth the color and density of rings.
My example shows that for this tree the color is the same so only its intensity changes. In this case you do not need to approximate all 3 functions. The bumps are a bit noisy due to another texture layer (ignore this at start). You can use:
intensity=A*|cos(pi*t)| as a start
A is brightness
t is age in years/cycles (and also the x coordinate (scaled) in your 1D texture)
so take base color R,G,B multiply it by A for each t and fill the texture pixel with this color. You can add some randomness to ring period (pi*t) and also the scale can be matched more closely. This is linear growth ,... so you can use exponential instead or interpolate to match bumps per length affected by age (distance form t=0)...
now just render the polygon
mid point is the t=0 coordinate in texture each vertex of polygon is t=full_age coordinate in texture. So render the triangle fan with these texture coordinates. If you need more close match (rings are not the same thickness along the perimeter) then you can convert this to 2D texture
[Notes]
You can also do this incrementally so do just one ring per iteration. Next ring polygon is last one enlarged or scaled by scale>1 and add some randomness, but this needs to be rendered by QUAD STRIP. You can have static texture for single ring so interpolate just the density and overall brightness:
radius(i)=radius(i-1)+ring_width=radius(i-1)*scale
so:
scale=(radius(i-1)+ring_width)/radius(i-1)

Sphere and nonuniform object intersection

I have two objects: A sphere and an object. Its an object that I created using surface reconstruction - so we do not know the equation of the object. I want to know the intersecting points on the sphere when the object and the sphere intersect. If we had a sphere and a cylinder, we could solve for the equation and figure out the area and all that but the problem here is that the object is not uniform.
Is there a way to find out the intersecting points or area on the sphere?
I'd start by finding the intersection of triangles with the sphere. First find the intersection of each triangle's plane and the sphere, which gives a circle. Then find the circle's intersection/s with the triangle edges in 2D using line/circle tests. The result will be many arcs which I guess you could approximate with lines. I'm not really sure where to go from here without knowing the end goal.
If it's surface area you're after, maybe a numerical approach would be better. I'd cover the sphere in points and count the number inside the non-uniform object. To find if a point is inside, maybe trace outwards and count the intersections with the surface (if it's odd, the point is inside). You could use the stencil buffer for this if you wanted (similar to stencil shadows).
If you want the volume of intersection a quick google search gives "carve", a mesh based CSG library.
Starting with triangles versus the sphere will give you the points of intersection.
You can take the arcs of intersection with each surface and combine them to make fences around the sphere. Ideally your reconstructed object will be in winged-edge format so you could just step from one fence segment to the next, but with reconstructed surfaces I guess you might need to apply some slightly fuzzy logic.
You can determine which side of each fence is inside the reconstructed object and which side is out by factoring in the surface normals along the fence.
You can then cut the sphere along the fences and add the internal bits to the display.
For the other side of things you could remove any triangle completely inside the sphere and cut those that intersect.

How to map points in a 3D-plane into screen plane

I have given an assignment of to project a object in 3D space into a 2D plane using simple graphics in C. The question is that a cube is placed in fixed 3D space and there is camera which is placed in a position whose co-ordinates are x,y,z and the camera is looking at the origin i.e. 0,0,0. Now we have to project the cube vertex into the camera plane.
I am proceeding with the following steps
Step 1: I find the equation of the plane aX+bY+cZ+d=0 which is perpendicular to the line drawn from the camera position to the origin.
Step 2: I find the projection of each vertex of the cube to the plane which is obtained in the above step.
Now I want to map those vertex position which i got by projection in step 2 in the plane aX+bY+cZ+d=0 into my screen plane.
thanks,
I don't think that by letting the z co-ordinate equals zero will lead me to the actual mapping. So any help to figure out this.
You can do that in two simple steps:
Translate the cube's coordinates to the camera's system (using
rotation), such that the camera's own coordinates in that system are x=y=z=0 and the cube's translated z's are > 0.
Project the translated cube's coordinates onto a 2d plain by dividing its x's and y's by their respective z's (you may need to apply a constant scaling factor here for the coordinates to be reasonable for the screen, e.g. not too small and within +/-half the screen's height in pixels). This will create the perspective effect. You can now draw pixels using these divided x's and y's on the screen assuming x=y=0 is the center of it.
This is pretty much how it is done in 3d games. If you use cube vertex coordinates, then you get projections of its sides onto the screen. You may then solid-fill the resultant 2d shapes or texture-map them. But for that you'll have to first figure out which sides are not obscured by others (unless, of course, you use a technique called z-buffering). You don't need that for a simple wire-frame demo, though, just draw straight lines between the projected vertices.

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