THREE.js raycasting very slow against single > 500k poly (faces) object, line intersection with globe

in my project I have a player walk around a globe. The globe is not just a sphere, it has mountains and valleys, so I need the players z position to change. For this I’m raycasting a single ray from player’s position against a single object (the globe) and I get the point they intersect and change players position accordingly. I’m only raycasting when the player moves, not on every frame.

For a complex object it takes forever. It takes ~200ms for an object with ~1m polys (faces) (1024×512 segments sphere). Does raycasting cast against every single face ?

Is there a traditional fast way to achieve this in THREE, like some acceleration structure (octree? bvh? — tbh from my google searches I haven’t seem to find such a thing included in THREE) or some other thinking-out-of-the-box (no ray casting) method?

        var dir = g_Game.earthPosition.clone();
        var startPoint = g_Game.cubePlayer.position.clone();
        var directionVector = dir.sub(startPoint.multiplyScalar(10));
        g_Game.raycaster.set(startPoint, directionVector.clone().normalize());
        var t1 = new Date().getTime();
        var rayIntersects = g_Game.raycaster.intersectObject(g_Game.earth, true);
        if (rayIntersects[0]) {
            var dist = rayIntersects[0].point.distanceTo(g_Game.earthPosition);
            dist = Math.round(dist * 100 + Number.EPSILON) / 100;
            g_Player.DistanceFromCenter = dist + 5;
        }
        var t2 = new Date().getTime();
        console.log(t2-t1);

Thank you in advance

Answer

I think you should pre-render the height map of your globe into a texture, assuming your terrain is not dynamic. Read all of it into a typed array, and then whenever your player moves, you only need to back-project her coordinates into that texture, query it, offset and multiply and you should get what you need in O(1) time.

It’s up to you how you generate that height map. Actually if you have a bumpy globe, then you should probably start with height map in the first place, and use that in your vertex shader to render the globe (with the input sphere being perfectly smooth). Then you can use the same height map to query the player’s Z.