Posted by ul on Dec 27, 2013; 8:14am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/picking-tp4031052p4031063.html

Thank you jmaasing for your input.

I agree my approach may be categorized as low-level picking. But on the other hand if you do it high-level you basically take on to implement the ray-tracing approach to graphics. And that's no cakewalk. I found it better to tap into the triangulation based graphics you find in the majority of graphics cards today.

Regarding the use of compute shaders, the advantage with my approach is that you don't need to treat lots of special cases, like picking spheres. picking cones, picking this or picking that. It works on any surface as long as it's triangulated and that's the beauty of it. If you can draw it you can pick it. In 3D graphics the triangle is a primitive data type like say a floating point number. Both are independent of what you draw or calculate respectively.

Well, I'm willing to motivate my choise but my immediate wish is to get an indication as to whether my approach is feasible in OpenGL. And so far so good, no one has said it's difficult or impossible. :)