Collision Detection using Rays

Ray tracing isn't just for rendering scenes, you know! It also comes in handy for 3d collision detection (as opposed to, say...projecting your collider onto all 3 coordinate planes and trying to call pointInPoly for each projected face...not like I tried that or anything...). I know this is just one hair strand, but the ability to maintain speed at this stage is encouraging. No more snapping either!

(yes, I know...his one eye creeps me out too)

Upcoming Tasks:

• Using Connelly's HairQuad class as a road map, begin devising a way of organizing hair strands into groups that collide with each other [Update: Actually, I don't think I'll combine hair strands into groups quite yet - I'd like to create classes for the other 2 LODs (hair clusters and hair strips) first. Maybe they can all be subclasses of the same virtual class (HairLOD or something like that). Then I'll look into ways of transitioning between the 3 (maybe based on proximity or occlusion - this will require reading through the Adaptive Wisp Tree paper again). So, I'm going to rewrite this task as: Implement self-intersection for hair strands. Then, create HairCluster and HairStrip classes, both with collision (self and collider) capabilities like the HairStrand class.]
  
• Try connecting the hair strand control points with curves (Bezier, Hermite, B-splines?)
• Continue to collaborate with Cat --> use OpenMesh objects as input for colliders (I'm currently using a simple .obj parser instead)
• Write the "Background" section of my proposal [Update: done, but I'll probably keep revising it]