Raytracing animated object - three.js

Is in any way possible to get intersection of a ray and an animated skin?
I'm trying to highlight animated characters and other objects in my game on mouse over, rather accurately.
I've set up an example of this with my current approach, so you can see the problem:
http://jsfiddle.net/Eskel/k44960Lp/1/
The model is rigged with a single bone and the bone animated to translate from side to side. Raytracing intersection turns it red. You can find the interaction in the middle, where I suppose it interacts with the static geometry.
I'm using Three.Raycaster
raycaster.intersectObject mesh

Related

Creating Heatmap Over 3D Model From Vector 3 Point Data

I am attempting to render a flat, dynamically created heatmap on top of a 3D model that is loaded from an OBJ (or STL).
I am currently loading and rendering an OBJ with Three.js. I have vector3 points that I am currently drawing as simple red cubes (image below). These data points are all raycasted to my OBJs mesh and are lying on the surface. The vector3 points are loaded from an external data source and will change depending on what data is being viewed/collected.
I would like to render my vector3 point data into a heatmap on the surface of my OBJ. Here are some examples illustrating the type of visual effects I am trying to achieve:
I feel like vertex coloring is the method of achieving this, but my issue is that my OBJ model does not have enough tessellation to do this. As you can see many red dots fall on each face. I am struggling to find a way to draw over my object's mesh with colors exactly where my red point data is. I was assuming I would need to convert my random vector3 points into a mesh, but cannot find a method to do so.
I've looked at the possibility of generating a texture, but 1) I do not have a UV map for my OBJs and do not see a way to programmatically generate them and 2) I am a bit lost on how I would correlate vector3 point data to UV points.
I've looked at using shaders, but my vector3 point data appears to be too large for using a shader (could be hundreds of thousands of points). I also feel it is not the right approach to render the heatmap every frame and would rather only render it once on load.
I've looked into isosurfaces with point clouds and the marching cubes algorithm, but I didn't think this was the right direction since only my data is a bit like a point cloud, and I am unsure as to how I would keep this smooth along the surface of my OBJ mesh.
Although I would prefer to keep everything in JavaScript for viewing in the browser, I am open to doing server side processing in any language/program with REST so long as it can be automated without human intervention, and pushed back to the browser for rendering.
Any suggestions or guidance is appreciated.
I'm only guessing but it seems like first you need to have UV coordinates that map every triangle to a texture. Rather than do this by hand I'd suggest using a modeling package. Most modeling packages have some way of automatically and uniformly mapping every triangle to a texture. For example in Blender
Next to put the heatmap in the texture by computing which triangles are affected by each dot (your raycasting), looking up their texture coordinates, projecting that dot into texture space and then putting the colors in that part of the texture. I'm only guessing that you need to not just do exact points but probably need to consider adjacent triangles since some heat info that hits near the edge of a triangle needs to bleed over into the adjacent triangle but that adjacent triangle might be using a completely different part of the texture.

THREE.Shape to mimic context.clip()

Using THREE.Shape, I can create holes, but rather than holes, I wish to define a clip mask.
I ONLY want to render the shape within a mask, similar to html's canvas/context .clip()
Is there a way to do this using holes or other method?
EDIT:
So, more background, I was using canvas to render segments, and imported them into three as planes.
The mouth was 1 canvas, and I was able to clip mask the teeth and tongue onto the black part.
See the whole movie at http://zsenji.com (rendered using the old canvas method)
Anyway, now I'm updating everything to use threejs and no more canvases rendered as planes.
I'm going to try three csg , which can hopefully intersect two geometries. https://stemkoski.github.io/Three.js/CSG.html
Then all I would have to do would be extrude the black of the mouth, and intersect it with the teeth/tongue. I will update
It worked.
I used very simple intersect, similar to https://github.com/chandlerprall/ThreeCSG/blob/master/examples.html
It's a little slow and there are still some other problems relating to overlapping paths, but for this issue, this was the fix.
All the different fills you see are three shapes

Isometric Sprites

This might be a stupid question but I'm stuck and can't get passed it. I'm making a isometric game and I have my map built using tiles, I just followed this tutorial to build the map, http://www.binpress.com/tutorial/creating-a-city-building-game-with-sfml/137. But now I don't know how to add character sprites. Do I have to add these sprites using tiles as well or do I just draw the the sprites into position of the screen. Any help would be much appreciated.
As far as I can tell from the engine, just follow the "Textures and Animations" guide and draw the Animation to the screen after you have drawn the tiles. This isn't a complicated engine, so you are only working with 2D sprites being drawn to the screen (the 3D effect is merely tricks of painter's algorithm to make it work...there is no z-axis from what the tutorial indicates)
The depth is done by the order of tile rendering
The same goes for objects,players,etc... Let assume plane XY is parallel with the ground and Z axis is the altitude. Then your grid would be something like this (assuming diamond shape layout):
Order of rendering
You have to handle object,players and stuff sprites in the same way as tiles (and in the same time). so you should render all cells in specific order dependent on your grid layout and sprite combination equation. If your sprites can overwrite already rendered stuff then you should render from the most distant tiles to the closest to the "camera". In that case the blue direction arrow on above image is correct and Z axis should be increasing in the most inner loop.
So now if you got any object,player or stuff placed in cell (x,y,z) then you should render it directly after the cell (x,y,z) was rendered prior to rendering any other cell.
To speed up is a good idea to have objects and players in your tile map as a cell. But for that you have to have the tiles in the right manner and also your map representations must be capable of doing so.

Adding text in three.js

I am visualizing a graph using Three.js and for each node of the graph I add a label using TextGeometry. It is a pretty small graph but when I add text my application gets really slow. What should I do about it?
TextGeometry is more suitable for cases when you are really interested in rendering the text in 3D. It will create complex geometry that will surely slow your app down specially when there is a lot of text or you use CanvasRenderer.
For labels, it is generally better to use 2D labels, which are way faster to render. There are many different approaches to this. These can go on top of the Three.js rendering canvas, on a separate canvas, or even normal HTML nodes positioned using CSS properties. Alternatively, you can dynamically create small canvases of your label texts, and use them as sprite textures always facing camera - this might be the easiest way as the labels would be part of the 3D scene as your other objects. For a separate layer approach, you need to use unprojectVector or such to figure out screen XY coordinates to match your 3D scene positions.
See these SO posts for example:
- Dynamically create 2D text in three.js
- Canvas and SpriteMaterial
- How do I add a tag/label to appear on top of several objects so that the tag always faces the camera when the user clicks the object?

Working with Three.js

Context: trying to take THREE.js and use it to display conic sections.
Method: creating a mesh of vertices and then connect face4's to all of them. Used two faces to produce a front and back side so that when the conic section rotates it won't matter from which angle the camera views it.
Problems encountered: 1. Trying to find a good way to create a intuitive mouse rotation scheme. If you think in spherical coordinates, then it feels like just making up/down change phi and left/right change phi would work. But that requires that you can move the camera. As far as I can tell, there is no way to change actively change the rotation of anything besides the objects. Does anyone know how to change the rotation of the camera or scene? 2. Is there a way to graph functions that is better than creating a mesh? If the mesh has many points then it is too slow, and if the mesh has few points then you cannot easily make out the shape of the conic sections.
Any sort of help would be most excellent.
I'm still starting to learn Three.js, so I'm not sure about the second part of your question.
For the first part, to change the camera, there is a very good way, which could also include zooming and moving the scene: the trackball camera.
For the exact code and how to use it, you can view:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/examples/webgl_trackballcamera_earth.html
At the botton of this page (http://mrdoob.com/122/Threejs) you can see the example in action (the globe in the third row from the bottom).
There is an orbit control script for the three.js camera.
I'm not sure if I understand the rotation bit. You do want to rotate an object, but you are correct, the rotation is relative.
When you rotate or move your camera, a matrix is calculated for that position/rotation, and it does indeed rotate the scene while keeping the camera static.
This is irrelevant though, because you work in model/world space, and you position your camera in it, the engine takes care of the rotations under the hood.
What you probably want is to set up an object, hook up your rotation with spherical coordinates, and link your camera as a child to this object. The translation along the cameras Z axis relative to the object should mimic your dolly (zoom is FOV change).
You can rotate the camera by changing its position. See the code I pasted here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/79219/three-js-camera-turning-leftside-right
As others are saying OrbitControls.js is an intuitive way for users to manage the camera.
I tackled many of the same issues when building formulatoy.net. I used Morphing Geometries since I found mapping 3d math functions to a UV surface to require v little code and it allowed an easy way to implement different coordinate systems (Cartesian, spherical, cylindrical).
You could use particles instead of a mesh I suppose but a mesh seems best. The lattice material is not too useful if you're trying to understand a surface mathematically. At this point I'm thinking of drawing my own X,Y lines on the surface (or phi, theta lines etc) to better demonstrate cross-sections.
Hope that helps.
You can use trackball controls by which you can zoom in and out of an object,rotate the object,pan it.In trackball controls you are moving the camera around the object.Object still rotates with respect to the screen or renderer centre (0,0,0).

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