I'm attempting to render a hemisphere in java. However, I'm wanting to render the slice that is defined by 2 angles - Azimuth and Elevation. Since I'm defining a slice, I cannot (to my knowledge) use any built in primitives. If the azimuth range is defined 0-360 and the elevation range is defined as 0-70, this will be a hemisphere with an upside-down cone-shaped hole in the top.
When rendering this inside "cone", I have chosen to do it as triangles in 5 degree increments. This means that with a 360 degree cone, there are 73 different vertices (if I did the math correctly: 360/5degree slices with the origin or tip of the cone being shared with all sides, and all other vertices shared by adjacent triangle slices)
My question:
Is it more efficient to render these as a single polygon with with many vertices, or many triangles with only 3 vertices each. If I do a single polygon, will I still have to include all three points for each triangle, or if it is a shared vertex, would I only include it once? Sorry, my graphics rendering knowledge is limited. Also sorry for being so verbose; I'm hoping someone may spot something erroneous in my thought process which may clear things up either way.
First - Use Google to find an algorithm to create a sphere that is not a primitive.
Second - Somewhere down the chain - triangles will be used. Most likely by the underlying library. But for you - it depends upon whether or not you plan to chop up the created region. If you are not going to subdivide the region further I would just make it one polygon. Actually, after thinking about it for a second - you can always divide up the polygon afterwards too. So just make it one polygon.
I thought about it some more and decided to amend this answer. There are two ways you can create a polygon in openGL. You can either create it as a triangular mesh or as an outline polygon. So if you were asking "Should I use a triangular mesh or an outline polygon" I would say use the triangular mesh. It is a lot easier to break up the triangular mesh than a polygon outline since, to break the mesh, all you have to do is to just stop at one of the points, include the last two points in the new object, and continue on down the triangular mesh. An outline polygon requires you to go both left and right around the polygon to locate the two points where the break occurs. If that is clear. If not say so.
Update: 12:05pm
When making a polygon you can use a triangular mesh or a polygon outline. The outline is mainly good for 2D whereas the triangular mesh works in both 2D and 3D systems. If you have any kind of a polygon at all bigger than just three points then it is a good idea to put them all into an array. This allows you to use the built-in routines that take an array and simply go through it to build your polygon. By putting everything into an array you also make it easier on yourself to add new points or remove points or adjust points. All you do is to change the array entry and then call the same routine to draw everything again. (Which should be just a single call to a function.)
Related
So, I'd like to figure out a function that allows you to determine if two cubes of arbitrary rotation and size intersect.
If the cubes are not arbitrary in their rotation (but locked to a particular axis) the intersection is simple; you check if they intersect in all three dimensions by checking their bounds to see if they cross or are within one another in all three dimensions. If they cross or are within in only two, they do not intersect. This method can be used to determine if the arbitrary cubes are even candidates for intersection, using their highest/lowest x, y, and z to create an outer bounds.
That's the first step. In theory, from that information we can tell which 'side' they are on from each other, which means we can eliminate some of the quads (sides) from our intersection. However, I can't assume that we have that information, since the rotation of the cubes may make it difficult to determine simply.
My thought is to take each pair of quads, find the intersection of their planes, then determine if that line intersects with at least one edge of each of the pairs of sides. If any pair of sides has a line of intersection that intersects with any of their edges, the quads intersect. If none intersect, the two cubes do not intersect.
We can then determine the depth of the intersection on the second cube by where the plane-intersection line intersects with its edge(s).
This is simply speculative, however. Is there a better, more efficient way to determine the intersection of these two cubes? I can think of a number of different ways to do this, and I can also tell that they could be very different in terms of amount of computation required.
I'm working in Java at the moment, but C/C++ solutions are cool too (I can port them); even psuedocode since it is perhaps a big question.
To find the intersection (contact) points of two arbitrary cubes in three dimensions, you have to do it in two phases:
Detect collisions. This is usually two phases itself, but for simplicity, let's just call it "collision detection".
The algorithm will be either SAT (Separating axis theorem), or some variant of polytope expansion/reduction. Again, for simplicity, let's assume you will be using SAT.
I won't explain in detail, as others have already done so many times, and better than I could. The "take-home" from this, is that collision detection is not designed to tell you where a collision has taken place; only that it has taken place.
Upon detection of an intersection, you need to compute the contact points. This is done via a polygon clipping algorithm. In this case, let's use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutherland%E2%80%93Hodgman_algorithm
There are easier, and better ways to do this, but SAT is easy to grasp in 3d, and SH clipping is also easy to get your head around, so is a good starting point for you.
You should take a look at the field of computer graphics. They have many means. E.g. Weiler–Atherton clipping algorithm. There are also many datastructures that could ease up the process for you. To mention AABBs (Axis-aligned bounding boxes).
Try using the separating axis theorem. it should apply in 3d as it does in 2d.
If you create polygons from the sides of the cubes then another approach is to use Constructive Space Geometry (CSG) operations on them. By building a Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) tree of each cube you can perform an intersection on them. The result of the intersection is a set of polygons representing the intersection. In your case if the number of polygons is zero then the cubes don't intersect.
I would add that this approach is probably not a good real time solution, but you didn't indicate if this needed to happen in frame refresh time or not.
Since porting is an option you can look at the Javascript library that does CSG located at
http://evanw.github.io/csg.js/docs/
I've ported this library to C# at
https://github.com/johnmott59/CGSinCSharp
I'm trying to fit two ellipses to what happens to be the top view / outline of a body. For simplicity let's use the following example:
As you can see, this simple body is made up of a long core (blue) and a head (red). In reality this outline would be in one color, I'm just using two colors for visualization purposes here.
I know how to fit a single ellipse to either parts of that outline, but I do not know how to do the fit to two ellipses, given the constraint that these two ellipses are actually connected. In this particular case the constraint is that the two ellipses will never part and that there can only be a certain angle between ellipse 1 and ellipse 2.
I'm grateful for any pointers that tell me how to write a function, so that after calling magic_fitting_function(body_outline) the program returns to me the coordinates of the two underlying ellipses:
EDIT1:
what is are the minimal requirements that could make solving this problem easier? E.g. if I were given one point, two points, etc, how would that possibly simplify the problem?
EDIT2:
I'm looking for a programming language independent solution.
EDIT3:
any hints on how to formulate the constraint of these two ellipses being located in a certain relationship to each other programmatically? E.g.: I know that the small ellipse will always be located at one end of the major axis of the big ellipse. Plus the small ellipse can only rotate by +- 90 degrees relative to the big ellipse.
I have never solved this problem, so I'm just throwing out a suggestion.
First, generate a bounding ellipse for the entire figure in order to determine what are the topmost and the bottommost points. (This step may not be necessary if you have a better way of finding these points.)
Next, detect the location of the "neck" by using a modified binary search. (Here I'm assuming that your bounding ellipse has a vertical orientation, as though the figure were standing up or standing on its head.) Generate two sets of bounding ellipses: one with an ellipse from the top of the figure to the 1/4 point of the figure (meaning if you draw a line through the bounding ellipse then the 1/4 point is between the top-left point and the middle) and with an ellipse from the 1/4 point to the bottom of the figure, and one with an ellipse from the top of the figure to the 3/4 point and with an ellipse from the 3/4 point to the bottom of the figure; the set of ellipses with the smaller total area is the one that is better encapsulating the head. Continue the search (e.g. next test an ellipse from the top to the 1/8 point / 7/8 point, and/or from the top to the 3/8 point / 5/8 point) until you've minimized the total bounding area of the set of ellipses; the point at which the ellipses meet is the neck. (No need to be too precise with this, it probably doesn't make much difference if you put the neck at the 34/256ths point or at the 35/256ths point.)
To detect the neck you may want to use bounding boxes instead of bounding ellipses.
Finally, adjust the two bounding ellipses in order to meet their angle constraints, e.g. by moving their extreme points in 5% increments (so assuming that the head ellipse's extreme points are on the y-coordinates 0 and 50 and the body ellipse's extreme points are on the y-coordinates 50 and 200, adjust them so that their extreme y-coordinates are on 0 and 60 and on 40 and 200).
If you have the complete outline, you can find where the two ellipses intersect - just look for the two sharp corners where the first derivative of your outline becomes discontinuous. Then, draw a straight line between those corners.
Everything on one side of the line is in ellipse A, everything on the other side is in ellipse B. The sharp corners are in both ellipses. Now, just fit a single ellipse to each of the two ellipses you've found and recalculate the points where the fitted ellipses intersect.
You can try isolating ellipses using the Hough transform. There are some FEX tools out there that are worth trying, for example this Ellipse Detection Using 1D Hough Transform.
Find the two points that are furthest from each other. One will belong to Ellipse1, the other to Ellipse2.
Check the nearest neighbors of these points to get 5 points belonging to Ellipse1, and 5 to Ellipse2.
Check out Wikipedia, and choose your favorite equation of an ellipse.
Using junior high algebra, for each ellipse, plug in the points to get 5 simultaneous equations, and solve these to get the 5 parameters that define your ellipse.
EDIT
I didn't realize this was tagged "matlab". In that case, once you have identified some points for each ellipse, there are matlab functions for fitting the points to an ellipse.
I bring you a maybe complex question which i would love your help with. Allow me to go straight to the point:
I desire an algorithm or logic in which i draw a shape using my mouse (for example a square) and it becomes a perfect square, with all the 4 sides in straight lines and perfectly regular. A human-drawn square is hardly perfect, but i wish that after it goes through the "filter" of this algorithm ,it becomes such.
A fine example of what i wish is in the game Trine, where the Wizard works by a similar principle: You draw a shape in the screen and it becomes the closest shape, that is, if you draw something similar to a square it becomes a perfect square box, but if you draw a triangle it becomes a perfect triangular box. Its like it detects what kind of shape it is and then draws a better version of it.
I want this for a game, just so you know what is the goal of all this.
Please help me figure out either the algorithm or logic behind this, or at least tell me what is the name of this kind of action (:
P.S. i added a simple image so it becomes even more clear what i intend =)
If I had to implement this task, I would store the recognizable patterns, and would try to make a match for them.
Take the minX, maxX, minY, maxY values form the user-drawn points, that will help you to scale the pattern. Choose the scaling so that the aspect ratio for the pattern would be the average of the X and Y aspect ratios.
The patterns can consist of certain number of straight lines. The pattern matches if
There are no points outside of the threshold
There is at least one user-drawn point close to each key points in the pattern
If you have the pattern matched, you will have the key points for your pattern (calculating the center of your pattern, and the size/aspect ratio). Then you can replace the user-drawn points with your image - that may be totally different from the pattern used to match (imagine a circle).
There are many ways to do this. One way that you could do it is to create a neural net that recognizes these shapes. I would generate variations of circles, squares, lines, and triangles with random perturbations to replicate "hand-drawn" versions. Then you would want to represent this as a two-dimensional array (where locations that have been drawn on would be 1's and locations that haven't been drawn on, would contain 0's). You can then convert this two-dimensional array into an input vector of n x n elements. The output of the neural net would be a vector with four elements, each one representing either a line, circle, square, or triangle. You would then train this neural net using your randomly-perturbed images until you end up with a neural net that recognizes the input with an error that is under some error-threshold. This is actually quite similar to recognizing handwritten digits.
Other ways include:
Shape contexts.
k-means clustering
Support vector machines
You don't have just an arbitrary shape, you also have the shape's path. So try counting corners. Decide on a angle threshold that will represent a corner. For each point, sample the next consecutive x number of points. Measure the angle between the first half and second half. If the angle surpasses your threshold, consider it a corner. (Obviously select the point that give you the best angle with the least amount of error, not just the first one that surpasses the threshold.) Mark the location of the corners and draw your shape to match.
Ellipses & lines: if no angles are detected, sample a few segments. Measure the orientation. If they are very similar, then line. If very different, then ellipse. If ellipse, find the bounding box and draw inside.
Hey, I'm currently trying to extract information from a 3d array, where each entry represents a coordinate in order to draw something out of it. The problem is that the array is ridiculously large (and there are several of them) meaning I can't actually draw all of it.
What I'm trying to accomplish then, is just to draw a representation of the outside coordinates, a shell of the array if you'd like. This array is not full, can have large empty spaces with only a few pixels set, or have large clusters of pixel data grouped together. I do not know what kind of shape to expect (could be a simple cube, or a complex concave mesh), and am struggling to come up with an algorithm to effectively extract the border. This array effectively stores a set of points in a 3d space.
I thought of creating 6 2d meshes (one for each side of the 3d array), and getting the shallowest point they can find for each position, and then drawing them separetly. As I said however, this 3d shape could be concave, which creates problems with this approach. Imagine a cone with a circle on top (said circle bigger than the cone's base). While the top and side meshes would get the correct depth info out of the shape, the bottom mesh would connect the base to the circle through vertical lines, making me effectivelly loose the conical shape.
Then I thought of annalysing the array slice by slice, and creating 2 meshes from the slice data. I believe this should work for any type of shape, however I'm struggling to find an algorithm which accuratly gives me the border info for each slice. Once again, if you just try to create height maps from the slices, you will run into problems if they have any concavities. I also throught of some sort of edge tracking algorithm, but the array does not provide continuous data, and there is almost certainly not a continuous edge along each slice.
I tried looking into volume rendering, as used in medical imaging and such, as it deals with similar problems to the one I have, but couldn't really find anything that I could use.
If anyone has any experience with this sort of problem, or any valuable input, could you please point me in the right direction.
P.S. I would prefer to get a closed representation of the shell, thus my earlier 2d mesh approach. However, an approach that simply gives me the shell points, without any connection between them, that would still be extremely helpful.
Thank you,
Ze
I would start by reviewing your data structure. As you observed, the array does not maintain any obvious spatial relationships between points. An octree is a pretty good representation for data like you described. Depending upon the complexity of you point set, you may be able to find the crust using just the octree - assuming you have some connectivity between near points.
Alternatively, you may then turn to more rigorous algorithms like raycasting or marching cubes.
Guess, it's a bit late by now to be truly useful to you, but for reference I'd say this is a perfect scenario for volumetric modeling (as you guessed yourself). As long as you know the bounding box of your point cloud, you can map these coordinates to a voxel space and increase the density (value) of each voxel for each data point. Once you have your volume fully defined, you can then use the Marching cubes algorithm to produce a 3D surface mesh for a given threshold value (iso value). That resulting surface doesn't need to be continuous, but will wrap all voxels with values > isovalue inside. The 2D equivalent are heatmaps... You can refine the surface quality by adjusting the iso threshold (higher means tighter) and voxel resolution.
Since you're using Java, you might like to take a look at my toxiclibs volumeutils library, which also comes with sevaral examples (for Processing) showing the general approach...
Imagine a cone with a circle on top
(said circle bigger than the cone's
base). While the top and side meshes
would get the correct depth info out
of the shape, the bottom mesh would
connect the base to the circle through
vertical lines, making me effectivelly
loose the conical shape.
Even an example as simple as this would be impossible to reconstruct manually, let alone algorithmically. The possibility of your data representing a cylinder with a cone shaped hole is as likely as the vertices representing a cone with a disk attached to the top.
I do not know what kind of shape to
expect (could be a simple cube...
Again, without further information on how the data was generated, 8 vertices arranged in the form of a cube might as well represent 2 crossed squares. If you knew that the data was generated by, for example, a rotating 3d scanner of some sort then that would at least be a start.
I have two geo-spatial simple convex polygon areas, in latitudes and longitudes (decimal degrees) that I want to compute using Javas Polygon class. I basically want to see if these two lat,long polygons intersect, and to calculate the areas (in sq meters) of both.
Now java.awt.Polygon class only uses x,y co-ordinate system, but I need to use lats,longs.
How can I do this, and/or is there any other classes/libraries available?
Why not use Polygon class multiplying coordinates for 10^n making them integers? Polygon accepts arrays of int as points.
Just an Idea
All you need to do is convert from spherical to rectangular coordinates if you think that really matters.
I'm not sure that it does, because the java.awt.Polygon is merely a data structure holding for pairs of values. If you read the javadocs, they say
The Polygon class encapsulates a description of a closed, two-dimensional region within a coordinate space. This region is bounded by an arbitrary number of line segments, each of which is one side of the polygon. Internally, a polygon comprises of a list of (x,y) coordinate pairs, where each pair defines a vertex of the polygon, and two successive pairs are the endpoints of a line that is a side of the polygon. The first and final pairs of (x,y) points are joined by a line segment that closes the polygon.
They happen to label those points as x and y, which makes all of us think rectangular coordinates, but they need not be from your point of view. A bug on the service of your sphere would view it as a 2D space. Your radius is large and constant. You just can't count on using any of Polygon's methods (e.g., contains(), getBounds2D(), etc.)
In this case, the important thing is your area calculation. You can use a Polygon for your area calculation, storing lats and longs, as long as you view Polygon as a data structure.
You might also thing of abandoning this idea and writing your own. It's not too hard to create your own Point and Polygon for spherical coordinates and doing it all with that coordinate system in mind from the start. Better abstraction, less guessing for clients. Your attempt to reuse java.awt.Polygon is admirable, but not necessary.
You can perform the area calculation easily by converting it to a contour integral and using Gaussian quadrature to integrate along each straight line boundary segment. You can even include the curvature of each segment at each integration point, since you know the formula.
Going off my intuition here.
If the polygons are small in ratio to the size of the planet you can treat them as flat polygons. The steps involved would be converting the lat/long into absolute x/y/z, taking any three of the points and finding the normal of the plane the polygons lie on and then using this to project the points into two dimensions. Once you have the 2D points it's easy to calculate the area or if they intersect.
Probably not the best answer but hopefully it will motivate some people to make better ones because it's a good question.
Maybe you could use GeoTools for this. It allows you to create Geometry objects, and check wether they intersect (see: Geometry Relationships)
Here is a solution that works like a charm:
Class PolygonArea from net.sf.geographiclib
Refer link below with sample code:
https://geographiclib.sourceforge.io/html/java/net/sf/geographiclib/PolygonArea.html
gradle dependency:
compile group: 'net.sf.geographiclib', name: 'GeographicLib-Java', version: '1.42'