Wireframe sphere with latitude/longitude OpenGL - java

I'm trying to create a wireframe sphere using openGL that has latitude and longitude lines. Currently I'm running into an issue that I think I'm simply overlooking and with a bit of help can quickly correct with creating the sphere. My code is the following inside of a class that creates displays:
double rho = 1;
gl.glBegin(GL2.GL_LINE_LOOP);
for (int i = 0; i< 360; i++){
theta = i/180 * Math.PI;
for (int j = 0; j< 360; j++){
double phi = j/180 * Math.PI;
double x = rho * Math.sin(phi) * Math.cos(theta);
double y = rho * Math.sin(phi) * Math.sin(theta);
double z = rho * Math.sin(phi);
gl.glVertex3d(x, y, z);
}
gl.glEnd();
}
From this code I'm currently not getting anything to display. What am I missing?

There are number of problems in this code:
As already pointed out in the comments, the glBegin() and glEnd() are unbalanced. The glBegin() needs to be inside the first loop.
The second angle should only loop from 0 to 180, not 360. This is based on the definition of spherical coordinates.
In the divisions i/180 and j/180, both values are of type int, therefore the operation is an integer division. With the values used, the result of those divisions will always be 0 or 1.
The calculation of the z-coordinate needs to use cos(phi) instead of sin(phi).
Not wrong, but just recommendations:
There's no need to use double precision values. OpenGL will use single precision anyway.
As mentioned in the comments, the code is using legacy features that are deprecated and deleted in modern versions of OpenGL.
Sticking with the immediate mode drawing, fixing these problems should result in working (untested) code:
float radius = 1.0f;
for (int i = 0; i <= 360; i++) {
gl.glBegin(GL2.GL_LINE_LOOP);
float theta = i * (Math.PI / 180.0f);
for (int j = 0; j <= 180; j++) {
float phi = j * (Math.PI / 180.0f);
float x = radius * Math.sin(phi) * Math.cos(theta);
float y = radius * Math.sin(phi) * Math.sin(theta);
float z = radius * Math.cos(phi);
gl.glVertex3f(x, y, z);
}
gl.glEnd();
}
This will give you the longitude lines. The code for the latitude lines will be very similar, with the two loops swapped.
As for the discussion about deprecated/legacy features, this is somewhat broad to be covered here. So just a very quick summary:
What you're using here is typically called "immediate mode drawing". This is the way OpenGL worked in the original version. More efficient ways of specifying vertex data were introduced around 20 years ago. Initially is was Vertex Arrays, then Vertex Buffer Objects (VBO). Vertex Array Objects (VAO) were introduced later to make the state setup more efficient.
With OpenGL 3.2, which was introduced in 2009, two "profiles" were defined:
Core Profile: Deletes the deprecated legacy features, including immediate mode drawing.
Compatibility Profile: Still supports all features to maintain backwards compatibility.
If you write new code, particularly if you just start learning, there's no good reason to learn legacy features. The initial threshold is slightly higher when using the Core Profile (mainly because it requires you to write your own shaders in GLSL), but it's well worth it. Current versions of OpenGL ES are also much closer to the Core Profile, and do not have any of these legacy featues.

Related

Gain/Persistence in Simplex Noise based on slope

I'm currently working on a terrain engine and I'm experimenting a little bit with noise. It's so fascinating to see what different structures, functions and pure imagination can create with just a few lines of code. Recently I saw this post: http://squall-digital.com/ProceduralGeneration.html, I was definitely intrigued by all of these techniques, but especially the first one caught my attention. The programmer made the gain (or persistence) of the noise to be proportional to the slope of the noise on that point. I'm currently trying to achieve this but I don't think I'm on the right track.
I'm currently using simplex noise. I know the author of the article uses Perlin Noise and yes, I have seen how to calculate the derivative of Perlin Noise, but obviously this implementation wouldn't work because of the fundamental differences in how Perlin and Simplex noise are generated. I thus set out on my own way to try and approximate the slope of noise on a given position.
I came up with the following "algorithm":
Calculate neighboring points of noise [(x + 1, z), (x - 1, z), (x, z + 1), (x, z - 1)].
Calculate their respective noise value
Calculate differenceX and differenceZ in noise values on the x-axis and the z-axis respectively
Create vectors from origin: (2, differenceX, 0) and (0, differenceZ, 2)
Scale to vectors of length 1
Add y-components of the resulting unit vectors
use this y-component as the "slope" approximated at the given point.
Now I have implemented this in code (I added "3D" vectors for the purpose of ease of understanding)
private static float slope(OpenSimplex2F simplex, float x, float z, float noise) {
float[] neighbours = getStraightNeighbours(simplex, x, z);
float xSlope = (neighbours[1] - neighbours[0]) / (2.0f * x);
float zSlope = (neighbours[3] - neighbours[2]) / (2.0f * z);
float[] vecX = new float[] { 1, xSlope, 0 };
float[] vecZ = new float[] { 0, zSlope, 1 };
float scaleX = Maths.sqrt(1.0f + xSlope * xSlope);
float scaleZ = Maths.sqrt(1.0f + zSlope * zSlope);
for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
vecX[i] /= scaleX;
vecZ[i] /= scaleZ;
}
float[] grad = new float[] {
vecX[0] + vecZ[0],
vecX[1] + vecZ[1],
vecX[2] + vecZ[2]
};
return grad[1];
}
Now this gives me extremely underwhelming and rest assured, wrong results: Result
Is there anyone that can explain me if this is a good technique to approximate the slope of if this is completely wrong. I'm not the biggest math genius so I was already happy I could figure this out and that it produced a result in the first place. If anyone has a resource linked to the derivative of simplex noise (which would be a life saver, obviously), it'd be really appreciated!

Trying to create a physics engine in java from documentary which uses c++

I am just messing around a bit in processing since i know it better than any other language and stumbled up on this website Custom 2d physics engine. So far so good. i am at the point where i have 2 rectangles colliding and i need to resolve the collision. According to the paper i should use the code :
void ResolveCollision( Object A, Object B )
{
// Calculate relative velocity
Vec2 rv = B.velocity - A.velocity
// Calculate relative velocity in terms of the normal direction
float velAlongNormal = DotProduct( rv, normal )
// Do not resolve if velocities are separating
if(velAlongNormal > 0)
return;
// Calculate restitution
float e = min( A.restitution, B.restitution)
// Calculate impulse scalar
float j = -(1 + e) * velAlongNormal
j /= 1 / A.mass + 1 / B.mass
// Apply impulse
Vec2 impulse = j * normal
A.velocity -= 1 / A.mass * impulse
B.velocity += 1 / B.mass * impulse
}
This is written in C++ so i would need to port it to java. And here i get stuck on two things. 1: What does the author mean with "normal"? how do i get the "normal"? thing 2 are these 3 lines of code:
Vec2 impulse = j * normal
A.velocity -= 1 / A.mass * impulse
B.velocity += 1 / B.mass * impulse
He creates a vector wich has only 1 number? j * normal?
I don'really have a clear picture on what exactly happens which does not really benefit me.
He is probably referring to this as "normal". So normal is a vector with 2 elements since you are referring to a tutorial for 2D physics. And j*normal will multiply each element of normal with the scalar j.
normal, velocity and impulse are vectors with 2 elements for coordinates x, y. From the series of tutorials you are referring to, you can see normal defined here towards the end.
The "normal" vector at a point on the boundary of a 2D or 3D shape is the vector that is:
perpendicular to the boundary at that point;
has length 1; and
points outward instead of inside the shape
The normal vector is the same all along a straight line (2d) or flat surface (3d), so you will also hear people talk about the "normal" of the line or surface in these cases.
The normal vector is used for all kinds of important calculations in graphics and physics code.
How exactly to calculate the normal vector for a point, line, or surface depends on what data structures you have representing the geometry of your objects.

Mathematical Equation Conversion

I'm attempting to write a method that determines the area of a polygon (complex or simple) on a sphere. I have a paper that was written by a few guys at the JPL that more or less give you the equations for these calculations.
The pdf file can be found here:
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/handle/2014/40409
The equation can be found on page 7, under "The Spherical Case - Approximation":
I also typed the equation in Word:
Spherical_Case_Equation
I need assistance with converting this equation into the standard form (I think that's the right terminology). I've already done something similar for the Planer Case:
private double calcArea(Point2D[] shape) {
int n = shape.length;
double sum = 0.0;
if (n < 3) return 0.0;
for (int i = 0; i < n-1 ; i++) {
sum += (shape[i].getX() * shape[i+1].getY()) - (shape[i+1].getX() * shape[i].getY());
}
System.out.println(0.5 * Math.abs(sum));
return 0.5 * Math.abs(sum);
}
I just need help with doing something similar for the spherical case. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.
I haven't read the paper you referenced. The area of a spherical polygon is proportional to the angle excess.
Area = r²(Σ Aᵢ - (n - 2)π)
To compute the corner angles, you may start with the 3D coordinates of your points. So at corner i you have vertex p[i] = (x[i],y[i],z[i]) and adjacent vertices p[i-1] and p[i+1] (resp p[(i+n-1)%n] and p[(i+1)%n] to get this cyclically correct). Then the cross products
v₁ = p[i] × p[i-1]
v₂ = p[i] × p[i+1]
will be orthogonal to the planes spanned by the incident edges and the origin which is the center of the sphere. Noe the angle between two vectors in space is given by
Aᵢ = arccos(⟨v₁,v₂⟩ / (‖v₁‖ * ‖v₂‖))
where ⟨v₁,v₂⟩ denotes the dot product between these two vectors which is proportional to the cosine of the angle, and ‖v₁‖ denotes the length of the first vector, likewise ‖v₂‖ for the second.

Avoid floating-point precision error in algorithm

In my 2D physics simulation (Java) I calculate the center of a convex polygon as follows, where the parameter area is the enclosed area of the polygon calculated before.
private Vector2d calculateCenterOfMass(double area) {
Vector2d center = new Vector2d(0, 0);
for (int i = 0; i < vertices.length; i++) {
int j = (i + 1) % vertices.length;
double factor = (vertices[i].x * vertices[j].y
- vertices[j].x * vertices[i].y);
center.x += (vertices[i].x + vertices[j].x) * factor;
center.y += (vertices[i].y + vertices[j].y) * factor;
}
center.scale(1 / (area * 6));
return center;
}
I further have a polygon with the following points I use the function to calculate the center of mass of:
Vector2d [x=325.20399446366355, y=400.0, length=515.5168649182318]
Vector2d [x=375.20399446366355, y=400.0, length=548.4323453822622]
Vector2d [x=375.20399446366355, y=450.0, length=585.8993407245727]
Vector2d [x=325.20399446366355, y=450.0, length=555.2095442399406]
As you can see just by looking at the y values the center must be at y=425.0. Due to floating point magic the y value becomes 425.00000000000017 instead. The area given as parameter has the exact value 2500.0.
How can I avoid this and get my expected 425.0?
BigDecimal could help, but I would suggest reading the whole answer.
Floating point errors are 'normal' in a sense, that you cannot store every floating point number exact within a variable. There are many resources out there how to deal with this problem, a few links here:
If you do not know what the actual problem is check this out.
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Poit Arithmetic
IEEE floating point
To give you an idead how to work: Quantity Pattern
Use Double to calculate and Long to store.

Fast transcendent / trigonometric functions for Java

Since the trigonometric functions in java.lang.Math are quite slow: is there a library that does a quick and good approximation? It seems possible to do a calculation several times faster without losing much precision. (On my machine a multiplication takes 1.5ns, and java.lang.Math.sin 46ns to 116ns). Unfortunately there is not yet a way to use the hardware functions.
UPDATE: The functions should be accurate enough, say, for GPS calculations. That means you would need at least 7 decimal digits accuracy, which rules out simple lookup tables. And it should be much faster than java.lang.Math.sin on your basic x86 system. Otherwise there would be no point in it.
For values over pi/4 Java does some expensive computations in addition to the hardware functions. It does so for a good reason, but sometimes you care more about the speed than for last bit accuracy.
Computer Approximations by Hart. Tabulates Chebyshev-economized approximate formulas for a bunch of functions at different precisions.
Edit: Getting my copy off the shelf, it turned out to be a different book that just sounds very similar. Here's a sin function using its tables. (Tested in C since that's handier for me.) I don't know if this will be faster than the Java built-in, but it's guaranteed to be less accurate, at least. :) You may need to range-reduce the argument first; see John Cook's suggestions. The book also has arcsin and arctan.
#include <math.h>
#include <stdio.h>
// Return an approx to sin(pi/2 * x) where -1 <= x <= 1.
// In that range it has a max absolute error of 5e-9
// according to Hastings, Approximations For Digital Computers.
static double xsin (double x) {
double x2 = x * x;
return ((((.00015148419 * x2
- .00467376557) * x2
+ .07968967928) * x2
- .64596371106) * x2
+ 1.57079631847) * x;
}
int main () {
double pi = 4 * atan (1);
printf ("%.10f\n", xsin (0.77));
printf ("%.10f\n", sin (0.77 * (pi/2)));
return 0;
}
Here is a collection of low-level tricks for quickly approximating trig functions. There is example code in C which I find hard to follow, but the techniques are just as easily implemented in Java.
Here's my equivalent implementation of invsqrt and atan2 in Java.
I could have done something similar for the other trig functions, but I have not found it necessary as profiling showed that only sqrt and atan/atan2 were major bottlenecks.
public class FastTrig
{
/** Fast approximation of 1.0 / sqrt(x).
* See http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/
* #param x Positive value to estimate inverse of square root of
* #return Approximately 1.0 / sqrt(x)
**/
public static double
invSqrt(double x)
{
double xhalf = 0.5 * x;
long i = Double.doubleToRawLongBits(x);
i = 0x5FE6EB50C7B537AAL - (i>>1);
x = Double.longBitsToDouble(i);
x = x * (1.5 - xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}
/** Approximation of arctangent.
* Slightly faster and substantially less accurate than
* {#link Math#atan2(double, double)}.
**/
public static double fast_atan2(double y, double x)
{
double d2 = x*x + y*y;
// Bail out if d2 is NaN, zero or subnormal
if (Double.isNaN(d2) ||
(Double.doubleToRawLongBits(d2) < 0x10000000000000L))
{
return Double.NaN;
}
// Normalise such that 0.0 <= y <= x
boolean negY = y < 0.0;
if (negY) {y = -y;}
boolean negX = x < 0.0;
if (negX) {x = -x;}
boolean steep = y > x;
if (steep)
{
double t = x;
x = y;
y = t;
}
// Scale to unit circle (0.0 <= y <= x <= 1.0)
double rinv = invSqrt(d2); // rinv ≅ 1.0 / hypot(x, y)
x *= rinv; // x ≅ cos θ
y *= rinv; // y ≅ sin θ, hence θ ≅ asin y
// Hack: we want: ind = floor(y * 256)
// We deliberately force truncation by adding floating-point numbers whose
// exponents differ greatly. The FPU will right-shift y to match exponents,
// dropping all but the first 9 significant bits, which become the 9 LSBs
// of the resulting mantissa.
// Inspired by a similar piece of C code at
// http://www.shellandslate.com/computermath101.html
double yp = FRAC_BIAS + y;
int ind = (int) Double.doubleToRawLongBits(yp);
// Find φ (a first approximation of θ) from the LUT
double φ = ASIN_TAB[ind];
double cφ = COS_TAB[ind]; // cos(φ)
// sin(φ) == ind / 256.0
// Note that sφ is truncated, hence not identical to y.
double sφ = yp - FRAC_BIAS;
double sd = y * cφ - x * sφ; // sin(θ-φ) ≡ sinθ cosφ - cosθ sinφ
// asin(sd) ≅ sd + ⅙sd³ (from first 2 terms of Maclaurin series)
double d = (6.0 + sd * sd) * sd * ONE_SIXTH;
double θ = φ + d;
// Translate back to correct octant
if (steep) { θ = Math.PI * 0.5 - θ; }
if (negX) { θ = Math.PI - θ; }
if (negY) { θ = -θ; }
return θ;
}
private static final double ONE_SIXTH = 1.0 / 6.0;
private static final int FRAC_EXP = 8; // LUT precision == 2 ** -8 == 1/256
private static final int LUT_SIZE = (1 << FRAC_EXP) + 1;
private static final double FRAC_BIAS =
Double.longBitsToDouble((0x433L - FRAC_EXP) << 52);
private static final double[] ASIN_TAB = new double[LUT_SIZE];
private static final double[] COS_TAB = new double[LUT_SIZE];
static
{
/* Populate trig tables */
for (int ind = 0; ind < LUT_SIZE; ++ ind)
{
double v = ind / (double) (1 << FRAC_EXP);
double asinv = Math.asin(v);
COS_TAB[ind] = Math.cos(asinv);
ASIN_TAB[ind] = asinv;
}
}
}
That might make it : http://sourceforge.net/projects/jafama/
I'm surprised that the built-in Java functions would be so slow. Surely the JVM is calling the native trig functions on your CPU, not implementing the algorithms in Java. Are you certain your bottleneck is calls to trig functions and not some surrounding code? Maybe some memory allocations?
Could you rewrite in C++ the part of your code that does the math? Just calling C++ code to compute trig functions probably wouldn't speed things up, but moving some context too, like an outer loop, to C++ might speed things up.
If you must roll your own trig functions, don't use Taylor series alone. The CORDIC algorithms are much faster unless your argument is very small. You could use CORDIC to get started, then polish the result with a short Taylor series. See this StackOverflow question on how to implement trig functions.
On the x86 the java.lang.Math sin and cos functions do not directly call the hardware functions because Intel didn't always do such a good job implimenting them. There is a nice explanation in bug #4857011.
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4857011
You might want to think hard about an inexact result. It's amusing how often I spend time finding this in others code.
"But the comment says Sin..."
You could pre-store your sin and cos in an array if you only need some approximate values.
For example, if you want to store the values from 0° to 360°:
double sin[]=new double[360];
for(int i=0;i< sin.length;++i) sin[i]=Math.sin(i/180.0*Math.PI):
you then use this array using degrees/integers instead of radians/double.
I haven't heard of any libs, probably because it's rare enough to see trig heavy Java apps. It's also easy enough to roll your own with JNI (same precision, better performance), numerical methods (variable precision / performance ) or a simple approximation table.
As with any optimization, best to test that these functions are actually a bottleneck before bothering to reinvent the wheel.
Trigonometric functions are the classical example for a lookup table. See the excellent
Lookup table article at wikipedia
If you're searching a library for J2ME you can try:
the Fixed Point Integer Math Library MathFP
The java.lang.Math functions call the hardware functions. There should be simple appromiations you can make but they won't be as accurate.
On my labtop, sin and cos takes about 144 ns.
In the sin/cos test I was performing for integers zero to one million. I assume that 144 ns is not fast enough for you.
Do you have a specific requirement for the speed you need?
Can you qualify your requirement in terms of time per operation which is satisfactory?
Check out Apache Commons Math package if you want to use existing stuff.
If performance is really of the essence, then you can go about implementing these functions yourself using standard math methods - Taylor/Maclaurin series', specifically.
For example, here are several Taylor series expansions that might be useful (taken from wikipedia):
Could you elaborate on what you need to do if these routines are too slow. You might be able to do some coordinate transformations ahead of time some way or another.

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