Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Mike the Elder wrote:
> > Testing the min_extent (or max_extent) of the intesetion of the two objects
> > seems to work pretty well.
>
>    It works pretty well if it's enough to see if the bounding boxes
> of the objects intersect.
>    However, bounding box is not the same as the object. In some cases
> the bounding boxes may intersect but the objects don't.

Warp is, of course, correct about this. Two shperes of radius 1 located at
<-1,-1,-1> and <1,1,1> read incorrectly as intersecting when it is just
their bounding boxes that touch.  For the "packing peanut" problem,
however, the min_extent test method, combined with some fudged tolerances
for moving each new "peanut" just a bit past the first point of positive
itersection testing SHOULD (I hope) provide a way of piling up a bunch of
them in a more efficient manner than placing hundres of them individually.
Designing the individual "peanut" in such a way that it mostly fills a box
sould also help.

Best Wishes All,
- MIke C.

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