Why don't translate(${x},${y}) and translate(${-x},${-y}) cancel out? - d3.js

This is a snippet from https://observablehq.com/#d3/non-contiguous-cartogram , which controls the transformation of the shape of states.
function transform(d, year) {
const [x, y] = path.centroid(d);
return `
translate(${x},${y})
scale(${Math.sqrt(data.get(d.id)[year])})
translate(${-x},${-y})
`;
}
Since x and y are constants, shouldn't translate(${x},${y}) and translate(${-x},${-y}) cancel out?
Further, why does this mechanism secure the centroid in its old position?

It is important to understand that SVG transformations are applied consecutively, i.e. order does matter. You cannot just add up numbers to consolidate a list of various transform definitions. In the words of the spec:
The value of the ‘transform’ attribute is a <transform-list>, which is defined as a list of transform definitions, which are applied in the order provided.
Each transform definition of that list manipulates the coordinate system that is the basis for all following transformations. Although, in your example, the translations are nominally of the same amount in opposing directions they do not cancel out because the scaling that happens in between changes the coordinate system along the way. Thus, the second translation does not cover the same distance as the first one.
To understand why those transformations keep the centroid in place it is helpful to write them down a bit more formally. Given the centroid's coodinates (xc, yc) and the scaling factor k we can write them as:
x ↦ xc + k (x − xc)
y ↦ yc + k (y − yc)
Every original point (x, y) is mapped to the centroid (first terms) and then moved outwards to its original position, yet it is only moved a scaled down portion of the original distance (second terms).
Plugging the centroid itself into these rules shows the second terms cancelling out which keeps the centroid in its original place whereby centering the whole transformation on the centroid:
xc ↦ xc + k (xc − xc) = xc
yc ↦ yc + k (yc − yc) = yc

Related

Raycast Players Distance to Grid Intersection

I am programming a raycaster in JavaScript. I am having trouble finding or implementing an algorithm for the raycast. Currently I am trying out the cast in the following style.
Theres an grid with equal block width and height. My player has a position within the grid, a direction as an angle 0 - 360 degrees where hes looking at. In the first step I need to figure out the distace from my Player to the Green dot at the Grid Intersection. I know that the Green Point is at the Intersection therefore i can figure out the length of the red line. Theres an right angle at the intersection. When I ve calculated the distance or x and y position of the green dot I have to do a simular thing in the 2nd step. The distance of the orange line is known, the position of the green dot and the angle is known. Again the right angle is on the intersecting border line.
I am not even sure if its possible this way, but maybe you got any other idea how I should then work it out. Thank you very much.
(Apologies for formatting below; I'm tapping this out on a phone)
From trigonometry, cos(aplha) = (length of red line)/(length of hypotenuse).
Therefore: length of hypotenuse = (length of red line)/cos(alpha).
You'd use sin for a vertical intersection.
A word of caution though: if you think about what would happen when the player is looking directly at a wall, all the lengths should be the same so that it's a constant height on screen, but they'll actually be different because the diagonals are different. You need to multiply by cos of the relative angle between the player's direction and the casting direction (so, if you've a 60 degree field of view then 0 at the centre of the display, off to +30 at one end and down to -30 at the other).
Also don't fall into the common trap of thinking that the angles you cast at should be evenly spaced. Think again of a person looking directly at a wall and use atan to get the proper relative angles.
The parametric equations of the ray read
X = x + t cos α, Y = y + t sin α
with t>0.
Assuming a unit grid (but you can rescale), and the angle in the first quadrant, the first intersections with the grid are
X = ceiling(x) => t = (X - x) / cos α => Y = y + (X - x) . tan α
and
Y = ceiling(y) => t = (Y - y) / sin α => X = x + (Y - y) . cot α
The smallest of the two t will tell you which of the horizontal and vertical is met first.
The next intersections are with X = ceiling(x) + i, and Y = ceiling(y) + j, hence the Y increase in steps tan α and the X in steps cot α.
For the other quadrants, the ceiling's are replaced by floor's.

Can i switch X Y Z in a quaternion?

i have a coordinate system where the Y axis is UP. I need to convert it to a coordinate system where Z is UP. I have the rotations stored in quaternions, so my question is : if i have a quaternion X,Y,Z can i switch the Y with the Z and get the result that Z is actually UP?
Just swpping two axes in a quaternions? No this doesn't work because this flips the chirality. However if you flip the chirality and negate the quaternion's real part then you're back in the original chirality. In general form you can write this as
Q'(Q, i'j'k') = εi'j'k' Qw_w + Qi_i + Qj_j + Qk_k
where
is the totally antisymmetric tensor, known as the Levi-Cevita symbol.
This shouldn't be a surprise, as the i², j², k² rules of quaternions are defined also by the same totally antisymmetric tensor.
I'm adapting my answer from this post since the one here was the older and likely more generic one.
It's probably best to consider this in the context of how you convert angle and axis to a quaternion. In Wikipedia you can read that you describe a rotation by an angle θ around an axis with unit direction vector (x,y,z) using
q = cos(θ/2) + sin(θ/2)(xi + yj + zk)
Your post only tells us Y ↦ Z, i.e. the old Y direction is the new Z direction. What about the other directions? You probably want to keep X ↦ X, but that still leaves us with two alternatives.
Either you use Z ↦ Y. In that case you change between left-handed and right-handed coordinate system, and the conversion is essentially a reflection.
Or you use Z ↦ −Y, then it's just a 90° rotation about the X axis. The handedness of the coordinate system remains the same.
Change of chirality
Considering the first case first. What does changing the coordinate system do to your angle and axis? Well, the axis coordinates experience the same coordinate swapping as your points, and the angle changes its sign. So you have
cos(−θ/2) + sin(−θ/2)(xi + zj + yk)
Compared to the above, the real part does not change (since cos(x)=cos(−x)) but the imaginary parts change their sign, in addition to the change in order. Generalizing from this, a quaternion a + bi + cj + dk describing a rotation in the old coordinate system would be turned into a − bi − dj − ck in the new coordinate system. Or into −a + bi + dj + ck which is a different description of the same rotation (since it changes θ by 360° but θ/2 by 180°).
Preserved chirality
Compared to this, the second case of Z ↦ −Y maintains the sign of θ, so you only have to adjust the axis. The new Z coordinate is the old Y coordinate, and the new Y coordinate is the negated old Z coordinate. So a + bi + cj + dk gets converted to a + bi − dj + ck (or its negative). Note that this is just a multiplication of the quaternion by i or −i, depending on which side you multiply it. If you want to write this as a conjugation, you have θ=±45° so you get square roots in the quaternion that expresses the change of coordinate system.
Try :
Quaternion rotation = new Quaternion(X,Z,Y, -W); //i had to swap Z and Y due to
No, you cannot exchange y and z -- it will turn into a Left-Handed Coordinate system, if it was Right-Handed (and vice-versa).
You can, however, do the following substitution:
newX = oldZ
newY = oldX
newZ = oldY
I suspect that what you really want is a simple rotation about the x axis. If that's why you want to switch y and z, then you should instead apply a rotation of -90 degrees about the +x axis (assuming you have a Right-Handed coordinate system).

Getting a list of locations within a triangle in the form of x,y positions

Let's say I have a triangle given by the three integer vertices (x1,y1), (x2,y2) and (x3,y3). What sort of algorithm can I use to return a comprehensive list of ALL (x,y) integer pairs that lie inside the triangle.
The proper name for this problem is triangle rasterization.
It's a well researched problem and there's variety of methods to do it. The two popular methods are:
Scan line by scan line.
For each scan-line you require some basic geometry to recalculate
the start and the end of the line. See Bresenham's Line drawing algorithm.
Test every pixel in the bounding box to see if it is in the
triangle.
This is usually done by using barycentric co-ordinates.
Most people assume method 1) is more efficient as you don't waste time testing pixels that can are outside the triangle, approximately half of all the pixels in the bounding box. However, 2) has a major advantage - it can be run in parallel far more easily and so for hardware is usually the much faster option. 2) is also simpler to code.
The original paper for describing exactly how to use method 2) is written by Juan Pineda in 1988 and is called "A Parallel Algorithm for Polygon Rasterization".
For triangles, it's conceptually very simple (if you learn barycentric co-ordindates). If you convert each pixel into triangle barycentric coordinates, alpha, beta and gamma - then the simple test is that alpha, beta and gamma must be between 0 and 1.
The following algorithm should be appropriate:
Sort the triangle vertices by x coordinate in increasing order. Now we have two segments (1-2 and 2-3) on the one side (top or bottom), and one segment from the other one (1-3).
Compute coefficients of equations of lines (which contain the segments):
A * x + B * y + C = 0
A = y2 - y1
B = x1 - x2
C = x2 * y1 - x1 * y2
There (x1, y1) and (x2, y2) are two points of the line.
For each of ranges [x1, x2), (x2, x3], and x2 (special case) iterate over integer points in ranges and do the following for every x:
Find top bound as y_top = (- A1 * x - C1) div B1.
Find bottom bound as y_bottom = (- A2 * y - C2 - 1) div B2 + 1.
Add all points between (x, y_bottom) and (x, y_top) to the result.
This algorithm is for not strictly internal vertices. For strictly internal vertices items 3.1 and 3.2 slightly differ.
I suppose you have a list of pairs you want to test (if this is not what your problem is about, please specify your question clearly). You should store the pairs into quad-tree or kd-tree structure first, in order to have a set of candidates which is small enough. If you have few points, this is probably not worth the hassle (but it won't scale well if you don't do it).
You can also narrow down candidates further by testing against a bounding box for your triangle.
Then, for each candidate pair (x, y), solve in a, b, c the system
a + b + c = 1
a x1 + b x2 + c x3 = x
a y2 + b y2 + c y3 = y
(I let you work this out), and the point is inside the triangle if a b and c are all positive.
I like ray casting, nicely described in this Wikipedia article. Used it in my project for the same purpose. That method scales on other polygons too, including concave. Not sure about the performance, but it is easily coded, so you could try it yourself (I had no performance issues in my project)

In a triangulated isometric grid, what triangle is a given point in?

I have a triangulated isometric grid, like this:
(source: mathforum.org)
In my code, triangles are grouped by columns.
As I hover the mouse, I want to calculate what triangle the mouse coordinates are in. Is there a simple algorithm to do that?
What you want to do is turn this into a grid as much as possible because grids are far easier to work with.
The first thing you do is work out what column it's in. You say you store that so it should be easier by doing a simple integer division on the x coordinate by the column width offset by the box start. Easy.
After that you want to work out what triangle it's in (obviously). How you partially turn this into a grid is you pretend that you have a stack of right angle triangles instead of a stack of isometric triangles.
The triangles have a length along the y axis (the side of the column). Divide that number in two and work out how many steps down you are. Based on the number of steps down and if the column is even or odd will tell you if you're looking at:
+--------+
|-_ |
| -_ |
| -_ |
| -_|
+--------+
or the reverse. At this point you only need to determine which side of the line it's on to determine which right triangle it's in, which also tells you which isometric triangle it's in.
You have a couple of options for this.
You could use something like Bresenham's line algorithm to rasterize the hypotenuse and when you hit the column you're in work out if you're above or below that line;
Because you only have two possible grids here (one being the reverse of the other so it's really only one). You could store a array of row values, saying that for column 3, the hypotenuse is at offset 2, whereas for 6 it's at 4 and so on.
You could even use (1) to generate (2) as a fast lookup.
The only other thing to consider is what happens if the mouse cursor is on an edge?
This is similar to what cletus said, but a different way to look at it I suppose.
I am assuming the triangle side is 1.
Suppose you have the grid as below:
y'
/
/__/__/__/__/__/__/
/__/__/__/__/__/__/
/__/__/__/__/__/__/____ x'
(0,0)
If you consider the grid in a co-ordinate system in which the x & y axes are at an angle of 60 degrees, a point whose co-ordinate in the angled system (x',y') will correspond to the coordinate in the orthogonal system (with same origin an general direction of axes) to (x,y).
In your problem, you are given (x,y), we need to find (x',y') and then figure out the triangle.
If i is the unit vector along x and j the orthogonal along y, then we have that
x'* i + y'( i/2 + sqrt(3) * j /2) = xi + yj.
(Basically the unit vector along the 'angled' y axis is i/2 + sqrt(3)/2 * j. The unit vector along the x axis is the same as the normal x-axis, i.e. i).
Thus
x' + y'/2 = x
y' * sqrt(3)/2 = y
Solving gives:
y' = 2*y/sqrt(3)
x' = x - y/sqrt(3)
Assume for now that x' and y' are positive.
Now if c = [x'], the integer part of x'
and r = [y'], the integer part of y'
then in the (angular) grid, the point lies in the cth column and the rth row. (Counting right and up and start counting at 0).
Thus we have narrowed down your point to a parallelogram
____
/\ * /
/___\/
(c,r)
Now in order to find out which triangle it is in you can consider the fractional parts of x' and y'.
{x} = x' - [x'] = x' - c.
{y} = y' - [y'] = y' - r.
Now,
if {x} + {y} > 1, then the point lies in the triangle marked with *.
if {x} + {y} < 1, then the point lies in the other triangle.
if {x} + {y} = 1, then the point lies on the line common to the two triangles.
Hope that helps too.

Finding the spin of a sphere given X, Y, and Z vectors relative to sphere

I'm using Electro in Lua for some 3D simulations, and I'm running in to something of a mathematical/algorithmic/physics snag.
I'm trying to figure out how I would find the "spin" of a sphere of a sphere that is spinning on some axis. By "spin" I mean a vector along the axis that the sphere is spinning on with a magnitude relative to the speed at which it is spinning. The reason I need this information is to be able to slow down the spin of the sphere by applying reverse torque to the sphere until it stops spinning.
The only information I have access to is the X, Y, and Z unit vectors relative to the sphere. That is, each frame, I can call three different functions, each of which returns a unit vector pointing in the direction of the sphere model's local X, Y and Z axes, respectively. I can keep track of how each of these change by essentially keeping the "previous" value of each vector and comparing it to the "new" value each frame. The question, then, is how would I use this information to determine the sphere's spin? I'm stumped.
Any help would be great. Thanks!
My first answer was wrong. This is my edited answer.
Your unit vectors X,Y,Z can be put together to form a 3x3 matrix:
A = [[x1 y1 z1],
[x2 y2 z2],
[x3 y3 z3]]
Since X,Y,Z change with time, A also changes with time.
A is a rotation matrix!
After all, if you let i=(1,0,0) be the unit vector along the x-axis, then
A i = X so A rotates i into X. Similarly, it rotates the y-axis into Y and the
z-axis into Z.
A is called the direction cosine matrix (DCM).
So using the DCM to Euler axis formula
Compute
theta = arccos((A_11 + A_22 + A_33 - 1)/2)
theta is the Euler angle of rotation.
The magnitude of the angular velocity, |w|, equals
w = d(theta)/dt ~= (theta(t+dt)-theta(t)) / dt
The axis of rotation is given by e = (e1,e2,e3) where
e1 = (A_32 - A_23)/(2 sin(theta))
e2 = (A_13 - A_31)/(2 sin(theta))
e3 = (A_21 - A_12)/(2 sin(theta))
I applaud ~unutbu's, answer, but I think there's a simpler approach that will suffice for this problem.
Take the X unit vector at three successive frames, and compare them to get two deltas:
deltaX1 = X2 - X1
deltaX2 = X3 - X2
(These are vector equations. X1 is a vector, the X vector at time 1, not a number.)
Now take the cross-product of the deltas and you'll get a vector in the direction of the rotation vector.
Now for the magnitude. The angle between the two deltas is the angle swept out in one time interval, so use the dot product:
dx1 = deltaX1/|deltaX1|
dx2 = deltax2/|deltaX2|
costheta = dx1.dx2
theta = acos(costheta)
w = theta/dt
For the sake of precision you should choose the unit vector (X, Y or Z) that changes the most.

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