Follow Closest Mesh

Questions
1

Hello everyone!

I modified a PG (originally created by @Raggar) so that 5 grey spheres follow 5 textured spheres when the distance between them is less than 2.

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#TXATGH#1

However, it seems that the grey spheres are only following specific textured spheres, and not simply any textured sphere that is within 2 units.

The goal is to get any grey sphere to follow any textured sphere based on the distance rule.

2

Hi Anderson34,

Essentially all you need to do is just check to see which sphere is closest, then follow that. The logic in the Playground appears to be laid out a bit differently that I would have immediately expected, but I believe you’re correct that each sphere in sphere2Array attempts to follow a specific sphere from sphereArray, based on index. To get them to follow the closest spheres, all you should need to do is switch from having sphere2Array[i]'s movement based on sphereArray[i]'s movement to something more along the lines of the following.

sphere2Array.forEach(sphere2 => {
    var distSq = -1;
    var tempDistSq;
    var nearSphere;
    sphereArray.forEach(sphere => {
        tempDistSq = BABYLON.Vector3.DistanceSquared(sphere.position, sphere2.position);
        if (distSq < 0 || tempDistSq < distSq) {
            nearSphere = sphere;
            distSq = tempDistSq;
        }
    });

    // nearSphere now points to the closest element in sphereArray to sphere2
    // Follow logic can now be performed here.
});

For more complicated scenarios you can do more complicated things to make this more efficient and fancy, but for a constrained case like this the above logic (or something along those lines) should be more than adequate. Hope this is helpful, and best of luck!

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3

Hello @syntheticmagus, and thanks for taking a look at this! I’ll work on incorporating this code into my project.

Thanks again! :smiley: :+1:

1 Like