Question

There are a few ways that I’m testing my ray-box intersections:

1. Using the ComputeIntersectionBox(…) method, that takes a ray and a box as arguments and computes the closest intersection of the ray and the box. This method works by forming a plane with each of the faces of the box and finding an intersection with each of the planes. Once an intersection is found, a check is made whether or not the point is on the surface of the box by checking that the intersection point is between the corner points.
   When I look at rays after running this algorithm on two different boxes, I obtain the correct intersections.

2. Using ComputeIntersectionScene(…) method without using the matrix transformations on a scene that has two spheres, a dodecahedron (a triangular mesh), and two boxes. ComputeIntersectionScene(…) recursively traverses all of the nodes of the scene graph and computes the closest intersection with the given ray. This test in particular does not apply any transformations that parent nodes may have that also need to be applied to their children. With this test, I also obtain the correct intersections.

3. Using ComputeIntersectionScene(…) method WITH the matrix transformations. This test works like the one above except that before finding an intersection between the ray and a node in the scene, the ray is transformed into the node’s coordinate frame using the inverse of the node’s transformation matrix and after the intersection has been computed, this intersection is transformed back into the world coordinates by applying the transformation matrix to the intersection point.

When testing with the third method on the same scene file as described in 2, testing with 4 rays (thus one ray intersects the one sphere, one ray the the other sphere, one ray one box, and one ray the other box), only the two spheres get intersected and the two boxes do not get intersections. When I debug looking into my ComputeIntersectionBox(…) method, it actually tells me that the ray intersects every plane on the box but each intersection point does not lie on the box.

This seems to be strange behavior, since when using test 2 without transformations, I obtain the correct box intersections (thus, I believe my ray-box intersection to be correct) and when using test 3 WITH transformations, I obtain the correct sphere intersections (thus, I believe my transformed ray should be OK).

Any suggestions where I could be going wrong?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

So the mistake was actually an implementation bug: when I was transforming the ray, I was transforming the pointer to the ray, which transformed all of the pointers within it as well (since the function is recursive). What I should have done is make a separate copy of my ray and perform the transformation on the copy, not the original.