design a circle in the 3-D space - oop

How to design a circle in the 3-D space?
For a circle in the 2-D space, two members are enough.
1 center;
2 radius;
but in 3D, how can I define the direction and the position of the circle?

One possibility would be to include a vector that's normal to the plane on which the circle lies. This has the advantage that if you ever decide to render the circle, the normal will be used to determine things like reflections off the surface defined by that circle.

Do you really want a Circle (a 2D Shape) in a 3D Space? Then this could be solution:
x,y,z: Coordinates of the center of the circle
dx,dy,dz: Direction of the plane the circle is located in
r: radius

Depending on what you want to do with the object - I have another alternative.
Model the circle as a unit circle in the xy plane with z=0.
with scaling, translating, and rotating operations done to it.
If you plan on doing many matrix operations on your objects, this may be the way to go.
You could also keep the unit circle's position, radius, and normal to plane information as properties. and have a method to convert between the two describing methods .
Circle() - Default Unit circle at (0,0,0), radius 1, xy plane at z=0
Circle(scale, translate, rotate) - my constructor
Circle(location, radius, normal) - the other proposed constructor

Related

Texture being stretched horizontally in Cinema 4D

I have a Poliigon Texture Demo c4d file. The file includes a sphere with a texture which renders correctly (bottom sphere in image). However when I create a sphere (top sphere in image), convert it to a polygonal object and apply the same texture it is being stretched horizontally.
I can fix this by changing the "Length U" setting to 50% in the Texture Tag but I notice that the sphere below does not need this modification so I was wondering how to convert the top sphere to a polygonal object the same way the bottom sphere is.
Cinema 4d Example
I have included a screengrab. The only notable difference is that the sphere below has additional diagonal division.
I am quite new to 3D so hope this all makes sense.
I think you only need to change the Sphere's Type, to a triangular type, like the sphere at the bottom.
If this helps, please consider up-voting and marking you question as solved

Three.js camera understanding

Here's the task:
We have an Mesh, drawn in position POS with rotation ROT
Also we have a camera Which position and rotation is relative to Mesh For example camera point is CPOS and camera rotation is CROT.
How to calculate resulting angle for camera? I was assuming that it something like:
camera.rotation.x = mesh.rotation.x + viewport.rotation.x
camera.rotation.y = mesh.rotation.y + viewport.rotation.y
camera.rotation.z = mesh.rotation.z + viewport.rotation.z
That worked strange and wrong.
Then I decided to read about it on docs and completely dissapointed.
There are several kind of rotation structures (Euler, Quaternion). But What a want is something different.
Imagine, like you are on spaceship. And it moves in space. You are sitting at starboard turret and looking at objects. They seems like passing by...
Then you want to turn your head - Angel of your head is known to you (in raw opengl, I'd just multiplied head rotation matrix on ship's rotation matrix and got my projection matrix).
In other words I want only x and y axis for camera rotations, combined in matrix. Then I want to multiply it with position-rotation matrix of an object. And this final matrix would be my projection matrix.
How could I do the same in THREE.js?
-----EDIT-----
Thank you for the answer.
Which coords should I give to a camera? It should be local, mesh relative coords, or something absolute?
I understand, that this questions are obvious, but there's no any description about relative objects in THREE.JS docs (besides api description). And the answer might be ambiguous.
Add the camera as a child of the mesh like so:
mesh.add( camera );
When the camera is a child of an object, the camera's position and orientation are specified relative to the parent object.
You can set the camera's orientation by setting either the camera's quaternion or Euler rotation -- your choice.
Please note that the renderer updates the object's matrix and matrixWorld for you. You do not need to do that manually.
three.js r.63

Are point sprites always perfect circles/squares?

I noticed that regardless of the shape (aspect ratio) of a texture, it will always draw as a perfect square, scaling unequally, when using it as a point sprite. I assume this is because points are, after all, circular.
If you wish to use point sprites on rectangular textures, is this possible using the point sprite mechanism, or would I need to just build quads with textures instead?
Or perhaps there is something that can be added to a shader to recognize and work with a rectangular texture? Currently mine are quite simple:
Vertex shader:
TextureCoordOut = TextureCoordinate;
gl_PointSize = 15.0;
Fragment:
gl_FragColor = texture2D(Sampler, isSprite? gl_PointCoord: TextureCoordOut) * DestinationColor;
Points have only one size, which will be equally applied to the width and height..

UIView cornerRadius - of what?

I am familiar with the cornerRadius property of UIView layers, exposed with the QuartzCore framework. The general rule of thumb, of course, is larger values create more rounded edges, and smaller values create less rounded edges. I'm curious though, the property is called cornerRadius, and I often find myself asking, radius of what? What and where is this circle whose radius I'm changing?
Imagine a circle at each corner of the rectangle framing the view. The rounded edge of the corner follows the arc of the circle. cornerRadius is the radius of that circle.
Take the 4 corners of a rectangle.
Starting at the corner points, you pass it a length to which the rounded corner should extend to.
This is the radius of the corner, or cornerRadius.
That's how I interpret it. Don't know if that's correct :P
This is more of a math question, but the above answer is mostly correct, except that the lines aren't circular. A radius is:
A radial line from the focus to any point of a curve.
(Source: Oxford)
As an example, note the non-circular curvature of some non-circular gears, which still have radii.
So, it's similar to what's described in the other answers, but the corner curve is not circular. If you're curious about the equation of the curve, just do the radius equation backwards. :-)

Creating seamless worldmaps with Fractal Brownian Motion

I'm creating heightmaps using Fractal Brownian Motion. I'm then coloring it based on the heights and mapping it to a sphere. My problem is that the heightmap doesn't wrap seamlessly. I've used the Diamond Square algorithm and it's pretty easy to make things seamless using it, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it with fBm and I seem to be having trouble finding an explanation for it on the web.
To clarify, by "seamless", I mean that when I map it to a sphere, it creates a seamless map on the sphere.
Instead of calculating the heightmap per pixel on the heightmap, calculate the heightmap in 3D space based on each point on the sphere and then map that to an image pixel. You're going to have trouble wrapping a 2D, rectangular heightmap like that onto a sphere without getting ugly results at the poles unless you start your calculations from the sphere.
fBM generalizes to 3 dimensions, so given a point on the sphere you can get the height at that point, and then you can do the math to map that value to where it should be stored in the heightmap image.
Or you could use one of the traditional map projections. A cylindrical projection (x, y)->(x, sin y) would give you a seam of just one meridian, which you could rotate to the back. Or you could "antialias" the edge by one or another means.
With a stereographic projection (x,y,z)->(x/(z+1),y/(z+1)), there's only one sour point (the projection point itself).