project point to body

EvanReese

I'm working on a feature that will pull points to a body in various ways: closest point, and projected along a direction. I'm using evDistance for the closest point and evRaycast for the projection. It seems like evRaycast is about 10x slower. What can I do to optimize? Should I even be using evRaycast? Performance matters because I'll be iterating over a large number of points.

Alex_Kempen

evRaycast set to closest is probably the most straightforward way to project a point onto a face along an arbitrary direction. If you know some stuff about the face you're projecting onto, however, evDistance can probably provide information much more quickly. For example, defining your line as a line object and then using evDistance with a query for the face and the line object should return a result which should include the parameter space coordinates for the point where the line intersects the face. It can also return the point of intersection represented as the length of the line along the specified direction, which can be pretty handy. Let me know if you would like me to explain what evDistance returns in more detail, as the nested maps and arrays can be quite confusing.

konstantin_shiriazdanov

evRaycast() provides a guarantee that the intersection found is the closest, which we haven't for evDistance(). And after all its not as slow. My project feauture can make a hundreds of evRaycast() calls per one feature call and it takes seconds

EvanReese

Thanks, guys. All of that makes sense. I think raycast has some advantages for what I'm doing, so I'll stick with it for now.