In this blog post we will cover some of the basics of the Barnes Hut algorithm. This is completely new to me, it is not an algorithm I’ve used/studied before (and I am by no means an astrophysicist). Nonetheless it has piqued my interest so I have decided to write about it. In this blog I will be talking about 2 dimensions unless otherwise stated, this just makes the resulting code run a little quicker and output easier to visualise. Modifying the 2d code to be 3d (or even higher dimension) requires only minor revisions.
While simple approximations to the bbox are trivial (such as computing the bounding box of their control points), in this article we deduce the exact bounding box analytically.
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- OpenSource and computer-graphics geek. I like/ride motorcycles too! Ex-Canonical/Ubuntu, CTO & co-founder of spot-on, currently at Heindenhain Numeric B.V.
Check out Arnold expert and 3D artist Lee Griggs' article + free downloadable content about a new technique he’s using to create visually interesting images with the Arnold 5 renderer in Maya