RAPID(1)RAPID(1)NAME
RAPID -- Robust and Accurate Polygon Interference Detection
SYNOPSIS
#include <RAPID/RAPID.H>
c++ -I/usr/local/include program.c++ -L/usr/local/lib -lRAPID -lm
DESCRIPTION
RAPID is a robust and accurate polygon interference detection library
for large environments composed of unstructured models.
It is applicable to polygon soups - models which contain no adjacency
information, and obey no topological constraints. The models may con‐
tain cracks, holes, self-intersections, and nongeneric (e.g. coplanar
and collinear) configurations.
It is numericaly robust - the algorithm is not subject to conditioning
problems, and requires no special handling of nongeneric cases (such as
parallel faces).
The RAPID library is free for non-commercial use. Please use this
request form to download the latest version. It has a very simple user
interface: the user need noncommerial use. be familiar with only about
five function calls. A C++ sample client program illustrates its use.
The current version of RAPID is version 2.01. The previous version was
1.04 - the change in version designation from 1.xx to 2.xx reflects a
moderate alteration in the library's interface (mostly just name
changes). The following changes from version 1.04 have been made:
Use include file "RAPID.H": The RAPID API now requires only that you
include "RAPID.H" and link to "libRAPID.a" to be able to use the
library.
Standalone library: RAPID no longer uses the SVM library. RAPID only
depends on the standard math library, "libm.a", which you probably link
to anyway.
Use object "RAPID_model" instead of "box": The C++ object into which
you load polygons is now called "RAPID_model". Previous versions used
"box," which was a holdover from prerelease implementations, and was
not a suitable identifier for the API.
Consistent use of "RAPID_" prefix: All the globals, such as those
which began with "OBBT_" now use the prefix "RAPID_". Note, also, that
the old constants "ALL_CONTACTS" and "FIRST_CONTACT" have been replaced
with the symbols "RAPID_ALL_CONSTACTS" and "RAPID_FIRST_CONTACT" in
RAPID 2.00.
No explicit library initialization: Previous versions required the
client to call 'box::initialize()' before any other RAPID library call.
This was a common but unnecessary source of client bugs (people forgot
to call this routine). RAPID 2.00 no longer requires this, since all
API routines check to see if the library has been initialized. This
extra check has had a negligible performance impact.
Revision of model construction interface: RAPID 2.00 requires calls to
BeginModel() and EndModel() to enclose the AddTri() calls for building
objects. This more resembles the OpenGL interface, with which many
clients will likely be familiar. Generally, preprocessing of the
objects will take place when EndModel() is called. Later versions of
RAPID will allow special procedures to be placed after the BeginModel()
call but before the first AddTri() call to give the client more control
over how the models are preprocessed.
Faster preprocessing: The preprocessing for RAPID has been greatly
improved in terms of speed. RAPID 2.00 is generally 5 times faster than
previous versions in preprocessing models. The quality of the hierar‐
chies have theoretically been affected, in some ways for the better and
in some ways for the worse, but we have not conducted a thorough study
to gauge overall impact of our changes. In a later release, we intend
to provide an alternative preprocessing algorithm which will be compu‐
tationally expensive but which will build better hierarchies.
No support for plain C: Some clients may not consider this an improve‐
ment, but support for plain C has been discontinued. Of course, clients
are still able to construct their own plain C wrappers for the C++
functions in RAPID. This change has made the implementation of RAPID
more clean.
SEE ALSOdtiquery(1)AUTHOR
UNC Research Group on Modeling
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~geom/OBB/OBBT.html
RAPID(1)
