Collision Detection in Interactive 3D Environments (Series in Interactive 3d Technology)
"Having read this book from cover to cover, I can summarize my opinion in two words from a mathematician's lexicon: elegant and beautiful. There is very little to criticize in this exquisite work."-Ian Ashdown, byHeart Consultants, Inc."Building a real-time collision detection system is by no means a trivial task. A firm understanding is required of the geometry and mathematics for intersection testing, especially when the objects are in motion. The skilled use of convexity is essential for distance calculations. The system must be designed carefully to support high-performance physical simulations. In particular, spatial partitioning and tight-fitting bounding volumes must play a role in minimizing the computational requirements of the system. The system is sufficiently large that the principles of software engineering apply to its development. Moreover, collision detection is notoriously difficult to implement robustly when using floating-point arithmetic. The challenges of architecting and implementing a collision detection system are formidable!Collision Detection in Interactive 3D Environmentsis an elegantly written treatise on this topic. Gino guides you through the basic concepts, provides insightful discussions on how to cope with the problems inherent in floating-point arithmetic, covers the all-important topic of computing distance between convex objects, and presents an informative summary of the spatial data structures that are commonly encountered in practice. And as an artisan of the field, Gino finishes the story with a case study-the design and implementation of his own working collision detection system, SOLID.This is the first book to provide all the details necessary to build a collision detection system thatreallyworks. I hope you will find, as I did, that the amount of material in this book is incredible, making it an extremely valuable resource."-Dave Eberly, president, Magic Software, Inc., and author of3D Game Engine Design, co-author with Philip Schneider ofGeometric Tools for Computer Graphics, and author ofGame Physics.