# Ray/Line intersection in 3D

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I found an enormous number of threads discussing how to do this in 2D, but none of them seemed to have a nice solution for the 3rd dimension.

What I would like to do is to get the intersection between a ray and a line. Why?
In my engine's editor you need to be able to select meshes, even when you are in wireframe mode (Like when you have multiple viewports open).
And in wireframe mode you can't just intersect the triangles of a mesh, this would give pretty confusing results.

It is also important that I can specify a fake-width of the line, because 1px space for clicking something isn't much! [grin]

My idea of how to do this is to have a plane instead of the line (In shape of a line, though), rotated to face the direction of the camera.
Only problem with this: I'm not very good at such vector math and have no idea of how to figure out the planes coordinates.

Would be great if someone could help me out.

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One option would be to render the wireframe to an image, rendering each line with the required thickness and its object ID as the colour. Once done it would simply be a matter of checking which colour is underneath the current mouse location.

This image would only have to be rendered when the user tries to select an object.

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Since I am using Direct3D11 I can't simply render those lines with the required thickness. I would have to create those billboarding planes anyways.

but how would I do that?

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The problem you're trying to solve is to calculate the distance between a ray and a line segment. When the ray approaches closer than some chosen value, you regard the line segment as hit.
I did exactly this in my editor using the information on the website below:

http://softsurfer.com/Archive/algorithm_0106/algorithm_0106.htm

They describe infinite line to infinite line distances, and segment to segment distances, but don't provide an implementation of the ray to line segment test. I created my own by making a few modifications to their code. Here it is:

float Intersection::rayToLineSegment(RAY_TO_LINE_SEGMENT& info,const Vec3& rayOrigin,const Vec3& rayVec,const Vec3& lineStart,const Vec3& lineEnd){	Vec3 u = rayVec;	Vec3 v = lineEnd - lineStart;	Vec3 w = rayOrigin - lineStart;	float a = u.dot(u);	// always >= 0	float b = u.dot(v);	float c = v.dot(v);	// always >= 0	float d = u.dot(w);	float e = v.dot(w);	float D = a*c - b*b;	// always >= 0	float sc, sN, sD = D;	// sc = sN / sD, default sD = D >= 0	float tc, tN, tD = D;	// tc = tN / tD, default tD = D >= 0	// compute the line parameters of the two closest points	if (D < epsilon) {	// the lines are almost parallel		sN = 0.0;			// force using point P0 on segment S1		sD = 1.0;			// to prevent possible division by 0.0 later		tN = e;		tD = c;	}	else {				// get the closest points on the infinite lines		sN = (b*e - c*d);		tN = (a*e - b*d);		if (sN < 0.0) {	// sc < 0 => the s=0 edge is visible			sN = 0.0;			tN = e;			tD = c;		}	}	if (tN < 0.0) {		// tc < 0 => the t=0 edge is visible		tN = 0.0;		// recompute sc for this edge		if (-d < 0.0)			sN = 0.0;		else {			sN = -d;			sD = a;		}	}	else if (tN > tD) {	  // tc > 1 => the t=1 edge is visible		tN = tD;		// recompute sc for this edge		if ((-d + b) < 0.0)			sN = 0;		else {			sN = (-d + b);			sD = a;		}	}	// finally do the division to get sc and tc	sc = (abs(sN) < epsilon ? 0.0f : sN / sD);	tc = (abs(tN) < epsilon ? 0.0f : tN / tD);	// get the difference of the two closest points	Vec3 dP = w + (sc * u) - (tc * v);	// = S1(sc) - S2(tc)	info.iFracRay = sc;	info.iFracLine = tc;	return dP.length();	// return the closest distance}

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I'm sure if it works for you, there should not be a problem with my editor. Can't test it now, though.
I'll post here again when I get a problem with it [smile]

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You could just do a normal ray-triangle intersection and calculate how far away from each of the edges the click is. If its too far from the edges, then just pass the ray through and don't count that as an intersection. This would also let you easily give the user the option of whether or not they want their mouse-clicks to be able to pass through the wireframe geometry (I personally wouldn't want/expect that to happen).

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