Box3D's Inscribed Spheres Trick Slashes SAT Edge Testing

Speeding up the separating axis test using inscribed spheres

Box3D's Inscribed Spheres Trick Slashes SAT Edge Testing

The separating axis test (SAT) is robust for contact manifolds but can be O(N³) for polytopes. Box3D already uses SIMD, feature caching, and contact recycling, yet large piles still bottleneck on edge pair tests. A new technique uses inscribed spheres to compute a cheap upper bound on separation for faces and edges. The key innovation: using the Gauss map edge arc to cull edges before the expensive pair test, drastically reducing candidate pairs.

The headline is that I have developed a scheme to use the Gauss map edge arc to cull edges before they even reach the edge pair test.

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2026-10-01