We Keep Coding

How to compute the vertices for a 3D polyline extrusion?

I have a polyline composed of multiple line segments. The line is very complex and squiggles all over the place in 3D, so for simplicity's sake let's say it looks something like this
I want to render it in 3D. Currently, I do a very simple process where I just generate a cylinder for each segment:
This is decent, but looks bad where the line changes direction. It is also wasteful - each of the direction changes requires twices as many vertices as is strictly necessary. I would be much happier with an approach that generated shapes like this:
At first I didn't think it would be too hard, but the more I've worked on it the more I've found it to be surprisingly nontrivial. I'm working in C#, and if this were in 2D I would just use Clipper, but I can't find any libraries or resources for how to solve this problem in 3D. It's okay if the solution isn't always perfect or sometimes leads to self-intersections or things of that nature. Anyone have any guidance?

So in a mathematical sense, the intersection of two cylinders is an ellipse. If I give you where the semi-major axis point on the ellipse is and the semi-minor axis you could calculate any number (like numsides) nodes on the ellipse.
Take the node connecting two segments located at a point p and define the two vectors of the ellipse as follows. a is the semi-major axis and b is the semi-minor axis
Each joining line segment has unit directions vectors e_1 and e_2 and the cylinder has radius R.
Then the intersection ellipse would be defined from the vectors a and b:
Then find a point c around the ellipse use the following parameterization with t = 0..1
Here is some C# code that calculates numsides points around the ellipse
// Vectors p, a, b defined
for(int i=0; i<numsides; i++)
{
double t = (1.0*i)/numsides
Vector c = p + a*Math.Cos(2*Math.PI*t) + b*Math.Sin(2*Math.PI*t)
// use/store c as needed for the mesh generation
}

I found this site which had an elegant solution. Starting with some points around the first line segment making up your polyline, you compute the intersection of the line parallel to the current segment that passes through each point and the plane formed by the intersection of the two current line segments.

How do I find the control points for a Bezier curve?

I need to implement connections in the form of curved lines in C# (Unity). I would like to get the result as similar as possible to the implementation in Miro.com (see screenshot).
After attaching the curve, I calculate the path of the cubic Bezier curve. For this first segment, the anchor points and offsets from the objects it connects are used. There are no problems at this stage.
Problem: When dividing the curve into segments by clicking and dragging one of the blue points of the segment (see screenshot), it is split in two in the middle. At the junction of two new curves, a new interactive (movable) point is formed for which the tangent and coordinates of the control points are unknown. I need to find the position of these control points every time the position of the interactive points changes (white points in the picture below). Moreover, the curve should not drastically change its position when dividing, not form loops, have different lengths of control point vectors (I'm not sure here) and behave as adequately as possible (like on the board in Miro).
By control points I mean 2 invisible guide points for the Bezier segment.
In black I painted the known control points, and in red those that I need to find. (Pn - interactive points, Cn - control points)
The algorithms I have tried to find them give incorrect distances and directions of control points.
The following algorithms were tested:
Interpolation from Tacent - jumps of the curve when separating, inappropriate direction and amount of indentation of control points;
Chaikin's algorithm - curve jumps during separation, creates loops;
"Custom" interpolation based on guesses (takes into account the distance to the center of the segment between the start and end points of the segment, as well as the direction between the start and end points) - has all the same problems, but looks slightly better than those above.
I suspect the solution is to chordally interpolate the points using a Catmull-Rom spline and translate the result to points for a Bezier curve. However, there are still problems with implementation.
The curves from 3DMax also look very similar. In their documentation, I found only a mention of the parametric curve.
Methods that I did not use (or did not work):
Catmull-Rom interpolation;
B-spline interpolation;
Hermitian interpolation;
De Casteljau's algorithm (although it seems not for this)
I would be immensely grateful for any help, but I ask for as much detail as possible.

Find helpful sources to understand bezier curves here and here.
To do what you want, I would give a try to the Catmull-Rom approach which I believe is much more simple than Bezier's, which is the one used in the itween asset, that is free, and you got plenty of funtionality implemented.
If you want to stick to the bezier curves and finding the control points, I will tell you what I would do to find them.
For the case of 2 control point bezier curve:
P = (1-t)P1 + tP2
To get to know the control points P1(x1,y1) and P2(x2,y2), you need to apply the equation in a known point of your curve. Take into account that the 2D equation is vectorial, so each points provides 2 equations one for x and one for y, and you got 4 unknows, x and y for each point.
So for the first node of the curve (t=0), you would have:
Px = (1-0)P1x + 0*P2x
Py = (1-0)P1y + 0*P2y
For the last point (t=1)
Px = (1-1)P1x + 1*P2x
Py = (1-1)P1y + 1*P2y
With these 4 equations I would try to achieve the control points P1 and P2. You can do it with t=0 and t=1 which are the supposed points you know of your curve and the ones that simplify the math due to the t values, but you should be able to use any as long as you know the points coords in the curve for determined t.
If the curve is a 3 control point bezier, you would need 6 equations for the 3 control points and so on.
I think that the best approach is to compound the curve of cuadratic curves composition, and calculate the control points for each chunk, but I am not sure about this.
Once maths are understood and control points achieved, In case that was successful I would try to implement that in the code.

Creating a curve between two points each with normalized vectors

So I need a write method to create a curve between two points, with each point having a normalized vector pointing in an arbitrary direction. I have been trying to devise such a method but haven't been able to wrap my head around the math.
Here, since a picture is worth a thousand words this is what I need:
In the picture, the vectors are perpendicular to the red lines. I believe the vectors need to be weighted the same with a weight equivalent to the distance between the points. It needs to be so that when two points are on top of each other pointing in opposite directions it still all looks like one smooth curve (top curve in the picture). Also, I need to integrate the curves to find their lengths. I don't know why I haven't been able to think of how to calculate all of this but I haven't.
Also I'm using csharp the language doesn't really matter.

Cubic Bezier will indeed achieve the requested effect. You need four control points per curve segment. Two define the endpoints and two others the directions of the tangents at the endpoints. There are two degrees of freedom left, telling how far the control points can be along the tangents.
The arc length cannot be computed analytically and you will need numerical methods. This other question gives you useful information.

Point in Polytope aka Hit Test

There are a set of points S in n dimensional space. I want to test a given point P is inside the region of S.
Since this is n dimensional space, points should form a polytope. Then the question is to determine whether a given point is inside the convex polytope.
I find this for 3-D polyhedrons but C++ libraries were not meaningful and I couldn't find their definitions. Besides it doesn't check the boundary conditions.
Another algorithm I found is for 2D polygons. I couldn't modify it since it is not clearly written. I can extend it of course but I'm not an expert in this domain so it's better to ask first.
Finally I found an algorithm for triangulation for concave polygon but I don't think it fits to my case.

Not sure what exactly you are asking, it seems you have several problems. First to compute Convex Hull of a point set. In 2d you can use BOOST or CGAL. For 3d CGAL. Not sure if they handle higher dimensions. For interior check, one way is (as the link you posted states) to check the ray intersection from the point of query to a known exterior point. The point of intersection of the ray (for interior point) should lie on a plane with normal pointing in the same direction as your ray. Meaning you are exiting the volume. A more efficient way would be to use something like a Binary Space Partitioning Tree (BSP). There are many links with tutorials on how that works.

From your description, you have established that S is convex. If that is the case you apply the hyperplane separation theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperplane_separation_theorem)
Find the point Q in S that is closest to P.
Construct a hyperplane H that lies on Q and is normal to P-Q
Test all the points in S on which side of H are on.
If they are all either on the plane or on the opposite side of H compared to P, then P is either on or outside of S. If some points are in front of H, and others are behind H, then P is inside S.

Algorithm to generate equally distributed points in a polygon

I am looking for an algorithm to generate equally distributed points inside a polygon.
Here is the scenario:
I have a polygon specified by the coordinates of the points at the corners (x, y) for each point. And I have the number of points to generate inside the polygon.
For example lets say I have a polygon containing 5 points: (1, 1) ; (1, 2) ; (2, 3) ; (3, 2) ; and (3, 1)
And I need to generate 20 equally distanced points inside that polygon.
Note: Some polygons may not support equally distributed points, but I'm looking to distribute the points in a way to cover all the region of the polygon with as much consistency as possible. (what i mean is I don't want a part with a lot more points than another)
Is there an algorithm to do so? or maybe a library
I am working on a C# application, but any language is ok, since I only need the algorithm and I can translate it.
Thanks a lot for any help

The simple approach I use is:
Triangulate the polygon. Ear clipping is entirely adequate, as all you need is a dissection of the polygon into a set of non-overlapping triangles.
Compute the area of each triangle. Sample from each triangle proportionally to the area of that triangle relative to the whole. This costs only a single uniform random number per sample.
Once a point is determined to have come from a given triangle, sample uniformly over the triangle. This is itself easier than you might think.
So really it all comes down to how do you sample within a triangle. This is easily enough done. A triangle is defined by 3 vertices. I'll call them P1, P2, P3.
Pick ANY edge of the triangle. Generate a point (P4) that lies uniformly along that edge. Thus if P1 and P2 are the coordinates of the corresponding end points, then P will be a uniformly sampled point along that edge, if r has uniform distribution on the interval [0,1].
P4 = (1-r)*P1 + r*P2
Next, sample along the line segment between P3 and P4, but do so non-uniformly. If s is a uniform random number on the interval [0,1], then
P5 = (1-sqrt(s))*P3 + sqrt(s)*P4
r and s are independent pseudo-random numbers of course. Then P5 will be randomly sampled, uniform over the triangle.
The nice thing is it needs no rejection scheme to implement, so long, thin polygons are not a problem. And for each sample, the cost is only in the need to generate three random numbers per event. Since ear clipping is rather simply done and an efficient task, the sampling will be efficient, even for nasty looking polygons or non-convex polygons.

An easy way to do this is this:
Calculate the bounding box
Generate points in that box
Discard all points not in the polygon of interest
This approach generates a certain amount of wasted points. For a triangle, it is never more than 50%. For arbitrary polygons this can be arbitrarily high so you need to see if it works for you.
For arbitrary polys you can decompose the polygon into triangles first which allows you to get to a guaranteed upper bound of wasted points: 50%.
For equally distanced points, generate points from a space-filling curve (and discard all points that are not in the polygon).

You can use Lloyd’s algorithm:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_algorithm

You can try the {spatialEco} package (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/spatialEco/index.html)
and apply the function sample.poly (https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/spatialEco/versions/1.3-2/topics/sample.poly)
You can try this code:
library(rgeos)
library(spatialEco)
mypoly = readWKT("POLYGON((1 1,5 1,5 5,1 5,1 1))")
plot(mypoly)
points = sample.poly(mypoly, n= 20, type = "regular")
#points2 = sample.poly(mypoly, n= 20, type = "stratified")
#another type which may answer your problem
plot(points, col="red", add=T)

The easy answer comes from an easier question: How to generate a given number of randomly distributed points from the uniform distribution that will all fit inside a given polygon?
The easy answer is this: find the bounding box of your polygon (let's say it's [a,b] x [c,d]), then keep generating pairs of real numbers, one from U(a,b), the other from U(b,c), until you have n coordinate pairs that fit inside your polygon. This is simple to program, but, if your polygon is very jagged, or thin and skewed, very wasteful and slow.
For a better answer, find the smallest rotated rectangular bounding box, and do the above in transformed coordinates.

Genettic algorithms can do it rather quickly
Reffer to GENETIC ALGORITHMS FOR GRAPH LAYOUTS WITH GEOMETRIC CONSTRAINTS
You can use Force-Directed Graph for that...
Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force-based_algorithms_(graph_drawing)
it defiantly can throw you a bone.
I didn't try it ever,
but i remmember there is a possiblity to set a Fix for some Vertices in the Graph
Your Algorithm will eventually be like
Create a Graph G = Closed Path of the Vertices in V
Fix the Vertecies in place
Add N Verticies to the Graph and Fully connect them with Edges with equal tension value 1.0
Run_force_graph(G)
Scale Graph to bounded Box of
Though it wont be absolute because some convex shapes may produce wiered results (take a Star)
LASTLY: didn't read , but it seems relevant by the title and abstract
take a look at Consistent Graph Layout for Weighted Graphs
Hope this helps...

A better answer comes from a better question. Suppose you want to put a set of n watchtowers to cover a polygon. You could see this as an optimization problem: find the 2n coordinates of the n points that will minimize a cost function (or maximize a value function) that fits your goal. One possible cost function could calculate, for each point, the distance to its closest neighbor or the boundary of the polygon, whichever is less, and calculate the variance of this sequence as a measure of "non-uniformity". You could use a random set of n points, obtained as above, as your initial solution.
I've seen such a "watchtower problem" in some book. Algorithms, calculus, or optimization.
#Youssef: sorry about the delay; a friend came, and a network hiccuped.
#others: have some patience, don't be so trigger-happy.