What are surface/curve trees?

Hi,

I am doing a project where I am shooting particles at multiple surfaces. I have been using the Rayshooter class and one of its shoot methods takes in surface tree node as a parameter. I am curious what OnSurfaceTree and OncurveTree are. Are they just data structures, how can they be used, what benefits are there to using them?

I would like to not have to test every surface for an intersection event when my particles are shot (especially when there are a large number of surfaces). Will the tree data structure allow you to just traverse all leaf items of one branch and not others and therefore half the search space? Or is this just conceptually wrong? Many thanks

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on March 9, 2010 at 4:14pm

Curve and Surface Trees (and Mesh Trees) are indeed data structures that speed up consecutive calls to Intersect and ClosestPoint.

For an in-depth discussion about how they work and when to (or not to) use them, please ask on the Rhino plugin forum as I hesitate to answer with my limited knowledge.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Jason Lim on March 10, 2010 at 4:06pm