I want to simulate a laser scanner which emits laser beam onto a 3D model to measure distance or other features from the model. The 3D model consists of vertices in xyz coordinate and faces; each vertex has also some user defined features.
The method should be simple. I define a view point and view vector (i.e. laser beam); what I need to do is checking the first vertex or the first face which is intersected with the view vector, then I can measure the distance and evaluate feature from the nearest vertices.
Is there any available library or tools to do that?
What you are talking about is, in a very literal sense, ray tracing. The maths and code behind doing this is not particularly complicated, especially if you don’t have to consider reflections. There’s a tutorial for doing exactly this in C++ here; triangle intersection is almost as simple as sphere intersection, and you can completely ignore the surface properties. If you don’t want to write your own code (but seriously, it’s maybe a hundred lines to do what you’re looking for), there’s a hint as to how to get Povray to do what you’re after here.
EDIT: More maths, including triangle intersection, is here.