Is there a raycasting library in C++ that is simple and open source?

Question

I'm looking for a library that will let me cast a ray into a scene model (it happens to be a terrain model in our case) and return the point of intersection in the scene. It does not have to be super-efficient (although I'd rather it not be super-inefficient). Ideally it would not have dependencies on other libraries (like OpenGL). I'm really looking for something that has just the functionality I need and no more.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Unless there are other requirements you haven't revealed, use CGAL 's AABB tree 's support for ray intersections ( example ).

(Please, don't even think about using this if you're actually trying to do terrain rendering though... there are far more efficient algorithms for ray-casting height fields for the purpose of producing images eg so-called voxel algorithms ).