Wednesday, December 02, 2009

A problem with AoI





I think that much of the problem we have with AoI comes from the very primitive way that they create a triangle mesh around a solid. Try, for example, creating a relatively long cylinder, convert it to triangle mesh at a fairly high resolution and then view the result via the wireframe option. The bloody triangles on the body of the cylinder are as long as the cylinder and incredibly pointed.




I've kept this cylinder rather shallow so that you can see things easily. If you stretch it to half a kilometer long you will still have the same number of triangles describing the barrel of the cylinder. It's madness. That is looking for all kinds of trouble with significant digits as I've found more than once. Oft times I use my polygon script to make, say, a hundred sided polygon, and then increase the number of segments from one, which gives you something that looks like this.



I find that this approach sometimes gets you more robust behaviour out of the AoI. Please note that I modeled this as a surface without ends rather than a solid so that you could see the triangles making up the barrel better.

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