Fastest way to tell if a line touches any of a set of faces?

EvanReese

I have a whole bunch of curves, and I want to tell if they touch any selected target faces. I first thought of evCollisions(), but I'm not sure it works with faces and curves (does it?). This is making me lean toward evDistance() and seeing if the distance is zero, which should work, but can anyone recommend something that will perform better? I'm looking for a high-performance solution since this operation could happen hundreds of times.

MichaelPascoe

I know evCollisions() works with curves and curves so I assume it will work with curves and faces. Not sure how high performance this will be.

GregBrown

I've actually been doing something with curves and faces and also mate connectors and faces - it's working well. In one test case I checked 300 curves against a spline surface... this evaluates all collisions in 30ms. 

EvanReese

ok cool I'll spend more time chasing that one down then. I've not used evCollisions() yet, so I need to learn it.

christopher_dziuba

evCollisions is a big part of a lot of the tools I want to make but it seems to me like it only evaluates faces when given solid bodies. How have you been finding it?

EvanReese

@christopher_dziuba
I ended up sticking with evDistance() for it, but it's been long enough that I don't remember if I first tried evCollissions() and it was slower, or I just felt it was good enough as-is.

christopher_dziuba

@Evan_Reese
That's fair. I'm noticing that the featurescript has a bit of a gaping whole with this limitation in being able to evaluate interaction between entities. That being said there's enough there for us to be able to make work-around's for now so I'm working with it.