Three.js - Accurate ray casting for collision detection

Question

I\'m working with Three.js, version 68. I\'m using the same method for collision detection as this guy is using here, which is great most of the time (A big

Answer 1

To answer your last question first: that line detects whether the collision happened inside your MovingCube. Your raycasting code casts a ray from the MovingCube's position towards each of its vertices. Anything that the ray intersects with is returned, along with the distance from the MovingCube's position at which the intersected object was found (collisionResults[0].distance). That distance is compared with the distance from the MovingCube's position to the relevant vertex. If the distance to the collision is less than the distance to the vertex, the collision happened inside the cube.

Raycasting is a poor method of collision detection because it only detects collisions in the exact directions rays are cast. It also has some additional edge cases. For example, if the ray is cast from inside another object, the other object might not be considered to be colliding. As another example, raycasting in Three.js uses bounding spheres (or, if unavailable, bounding boxes) to calculate ray intersection, so rays can "intersect" with objects even if they wouldn't hit them visually.

If you're only dealing with spheres or upright cuboids, it's straightforward math to check collision. (That's why Three.js uses bounding spheres and bounding boxes - and most applications that need to do collision checking use secondary collision-only geometries that are less complicated than the rendered ones.) Spheres are colliding if the distance between their centers is less than the sum of their radii. Boxes are colliding if the edges overlap (e.g. if the left edge of box 1 is to the left of the right edge of box 2, and the boxes are within a vertical distance the sum of their half-heights and a horizontal distance the sum of their half-lengths).

For certain applications you can also use voxels, e.g. divide the world into cubical units, do box math, and say that two objects are colliding if they overlap with the same cube-unit.

For more complex applications, you'll probably want to use a library like Ammo.js, Cannon.js, or Physi.js.

The reason raycasting is appealing is because it's workable with more complex geometries without using a library. As you've discovered, however, it's less than perfect. :-)

I wrote a book called Game Development with Three.js which goes into this topic in some depth. (I won't link to it here because I'm not here to promote it, but you can Google it if you're interested.) The book comes with sample code that shows how to do basic collision detection, including full code for a 3D capture-the-flag game.