How are polygon "sleeves" called and how are they calculated? - geometry

When a polygon gets rotated it skips all possible rotations in between the current and the desired situation. Here are 3 images illustrating what I mean:
This is the current polygon:
Rotating it 45 degrees (in clockwise direction) would result in:
The current polygon rotated by 45 degrees in clockwise direction, with all possible situations in between would result in:
How are these "sleeves" (in-between situations) actually called, and how are these "complete polygons" calculated/approximated based on the current polygon and desired angle of rotation?

In the CAD industry, we would call this operation a 2d sweep, or a 2d planar sweep; in this case a 2d planar rotational sweep. (Not to be confused with a sweep line algorithm.) The resulting area would be the 2d swept area or 2d swept face, and the outline called the 2d swept boundary.
A couple of papers on the topic can be found here:
Polygonal boundary approximation for a 2D general sweep based on envelope and boolean operations (2000) (another link, and a direct PDF Link.)
Approximate General Sweep Boundary of a 2D Curved Object (1993).
Your case of a 2d rotational sweep is not as general as the cases considered in these papers. If you think about sweeping just a single curve -- a line or an arc, say -- then the boundary curves of the swept area in 2d will as follows. Imagine sweeping the curve in 3d, where the curve is simultaneously extruded along the axis of rotation as it is rotated around the axis. In that case, the boundaries of your 2d sweep would be the boundaries of the 3d swept surface projected back to 2d plus the 3d silhouettes of the swept surface projected back into 2d, taking the axis of rotation as the view vector for silhouette creation.
Computing silhouettes of general surfaces is nontrivial, but for a rotational sweep + extrusion along the axis of rotation the silhouettes will be traced out by points where the tangent of the swept curve is parallel to the direction of rotation -- i.e., perpendicular to the radius vector drawn out from the center of rotation. Thus an algorithm to compute your 2d area might look like:
For each edge segment of the area to be rotationally swept,
Split the edge where the tangent becomes parallel to the direction of rotation.
Exclude any degenerate curves -- arcs that are coaxial with the axis of rotation.
For each split edge segment, form a 2d area comprised of the start position of the curve, the end position of the curve, and the start and end points connected by arcs. Since we split at the silhouette points, there should be no self intersections.
Do a 2d boolean of the 2d area in its start position, its end position, and the swept areas created in the first steps.

Related

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

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.

Intersection of a convex polygon and a moving circle

I have a straight line which intersects a convex polygon in 2D plane. There exists a circle with constant radius. The center of circle is moving on this line. So at first the polygon and circle don't intersect with each other, as the circle gets closer to the polygon the intersection increases and then decreases as they go further from each other. I want to prove the area of the intersection of the convex polygon and circle doesn't have local minima(as the circle moves on the line).
Interesting problem. Please post solution once you find it. My approach would be to take a similar route to Fortunes algorithm to build a Voronoi graph - meaning I would consider "events" that are happening when the circle traverses a convex polygon.
Basically to better understand the problem, consider the restriction that the circle is traveling on straight line - why is that important - look at counter examples. Then look when will this fail if poly is not convex?
The events that I would consider would be an entry/exit of a poly vertex into circle, and entry exit of an poly edge from/into the circle. Then keep track of area increasing or decreasing through each event, and show that it is necessarily monotonic.

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.

Convert quadratic curve to cubic curve

Looking at Convert a quadratic bezier to a cubic?, I can finally understand why programming teachers always told me that math was so important. Sadly, I didn't listen.
Can anyone provide a more concrete - e.g., computer-language-y - formula for converting a quadratic curve to a cubic? Understanding that there's some rounding errors possible, which is fine.
Given a quad curve represented by variables:
StartX, StartY
ControlX, ControlY
EndX, EndY
And desiring StartX, StartY and EndX, EndY to remain the same, but to now have Control1X, Control1Y and Control2X, Control2Y of a cubic curve.
Is it...
Control1X = StartX + (.66 * (ControlX - StartX))
Control2X = EndX + (.66 * (ControlX - EndX))
With the same essential functions used to calculate Control1Y and Control2Y?
Your code is right except that you should use 2.0/3.0 instead of 0.66.
You avoid most rounding errors by using
Control1 = (Start + 2 * Control) / 3
Control2 = (End + 2 * Control) / 3
Note that line segments are also convertible to cubic Bezier curves using:
Control1 = Start
Control2 = End
This can be handy when converting a complex path mixing various types of curves (linear, quadratic, cubic).
There's also a basic transform for converting elliptic arcs to cubic (with some minor unnoticeable errors): you just have to split at least the arc on elliptic quadrans (cutting the ellipse first on the two orthogonal axis of symetries, or on arbitrary orthogonal axis passing through the center if the ellipse is a circle, then representing each arc; when the ellipse is a circle, the two focal points are confused on the same point, the center of the circle, so you can use any direction for one of the orthogonal axis).
Many SVG renderers do that by adding an additional split on octants (so that you get also precise position not only for points where the two main axis are passing through, but also for two diagonal axis which are bissecting (when the ellipse is a circle) each quadrant (when the ellipse is not a circle, assimilate it as a circle flattened with a linear transform along the small axis only, you do the same computation), because octants are also quite precisely positioned:
cos(pi/4) = sin(pi/4) = sqrt(2)/2 ≈ 0.71, and because this additional splitting will allow precise rendering of tangents on points crossing the diagonals at 45 degrees of the circle.
A full ellipse is then converted to 8 cubic arcs (i.e. 8 points on ellipse and 16 control points): you'll almost not notice the difference between elliptical arcs and these generated cubic arcs
You can create an algorithm that uses the same "flattening error" computed when splitting a Bezier to a list of linear segments, which are then drawn using the classic fast Bresenham algo for line segments; a "flattenning" algorithm just has to measure the relative deviation of the sum of lengths of the two straight segments joining the two focal points of the ellipse to any point of the generated cubic arcs, as this sum is constant on any true ellipse: if you make this measurement on the generated control points for the cubic arcs, the difference should be below a given percentage of the expected sum, or within an absolute distance precision, and can be used to create better approximation of control points with a simple linear formula so that these added points will be on the real ellipse.
Such transform of arbitrary paths is useful when you want to derive other curves from the path, notably the curves of "buffers" at a given distance, notably when these paths must be converted to "strokes" with a defined "stroke width": you need to compute two "inner" and "outer" curves and then concentrate on how to converting the miters/buts/squares/rounded corners, and then to cut long miters at a convenient distance (matching the "miter limit" factor times the "stroke width").
More advanced renderers will also use miters represented by tangent circles when there's a corner between two arcs instead of two segments (this is useful for drawing cute geographic maps)...
Converting an arbitrary path mixing segments, elliptic and bezier arcs to only cubic arcs is a necessary step to compute precise images without excessive defects visible when zooming in. This is then necessary when your "stroke" buffers have to take some effects (such as computing dashes), and then enhancing the result with semi-transparent pixels or subpixels to smooth the rendered strokes (smoothing is easy to computez only when everything has been flattened to line segments, and alsos may be simpler to develop if it only has to manage paths containing only cubic beziers: it can easily be parallelized if needed and accelerated by hardware). Bezier arcs are always interesting because drawing them is fast and requires only basic arithmetics, and the time needed to draw them is proportional to the length of the curve with every point drawn with the same accuracy level.
In summary, all curves are representable by cubic Bezier arcs with a maximum measurable deviation allowed (you can set this maximum deviation to one half pixel, or one subpixel if you first scale up the measurement grid for half-toning or subpixel shading, and then represent accurately every curve with a reasonnaly fast rendering, and get accurate rendering at any zoom level with curves smoothed everywhere, including with half-toning or transparency levels when finally drawing the linear strokes with the classic Bresenham algorithm using fast integer-only arithmetics). These rendered curve will all have the correct tangeants everywhere, without any unexpected angles visible on approximation points, and the remaining control points in the approximation will make also a good smooth rendering of the curvature everywhere (i.e. radius of the tangeant circle), so you can use this approximation as well to derive other measurements such as acceleration, inertial forces, or magnetic effects of paths of charged particles).
If you ever need higher precision, use Bezier arcs with degree 4 (i.e. with 3 control points between points on curve) to get smoothed derivation at a supplementary degree (e.g. gradients of forces), or just split the cubic arcs with additional steps further, until the derivation is smooth enough (but using degree-4 Bezier arcs requires much less points curves and less control points for the same accuracy tolerances, than when using cubic Bezier only).

polygon vertices - clockwise or counterclockwise

I came across this link http://www.mathopenref.com/coordpolygonarea2.html
It explains how to calculate the area of a polygon and helps to identify whether the polygon vertices we entered is clockwise or counter clockwise.
If area value is +ve, it is clockwise, if it is -nv then it is in counterclockwise.
My requirement is to identify only whether it is clockwise or counterclockwise. Is this rule will work correctly (though there are limitations as mentioned in the link). I have only regular polygons (not complicated, no self intersections) but the vertices are more.
I am not interested in the area value accuracy, just to know the ring rotation.
Any other thought on this.
For convex polygons:
Select two edges with a common vertex.
Lets say, edge1 is between vertex A and B. Edge2 is between vertex B and C.
Define to vectors: vect1: A----->B
vect2: B----->C
Cross product vect1 and vect2.
If the result is positive, the sequence A-->B-->C is Counter-clockwise.
If the result is negative, the sequence A-->B-->C is clockwise.
If you have only convex polygons (and all regular polygons are convex), and if your points are all organized consistently--either all counterclockwise or all clockwise--then you can determine which by just computing the (signed) area of one triangle determined by any three consecutive points. This is essentially computing the cross product of the two vectors along the two edges.

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