Bounding volume

An enveloping body (English bounding volume ) is a simple geometric shape that encloses a complex three-dimensional object or a complex body in computational geometry.

Applications and variants

Bounding volumes are primarily used to accelerate algorithms computational geometry and computer graphics, such as raytracing. They are often hierarchically structured ( bounding volumes enclosing other bounding volumes) in order to increase the efficiency further.

The following bounding volumes are used:

• Balls ( Bounding Spheres ). This type of bounding volumes is particularly widespread in the collision detection, as can be collisions with balls very easy to calculate.

• Square or cube ( bounding boxes ). Bounding boxes describe objects often more accurate than bullets and are therefore in some applications such as ray tracing of advantage. About Bounding Volume Hierarchies ( BVH ) ray tracing can be accelerated. Any oriented cuboids are also referred to as oriented bounding boxes ( OBB ), aligned to the axes square as Axis -Aligned Bounding Boxes ( AABB ). AABBs are usually defined by two points, which indicate the position of the corners on both sides of a cube diagonals.

• Polyhedron, also k- DOP or k- Discrete Oriented Polytopes called. Unlike OBBs polyhedra allow multiple constraint surfaces, allowing them to enclose objects better ( narrower).