2. RAPID does not contain any I/O routines. You will have to write your own functions to read and parse files to obtain the polygons which define a model. The ONLY way to feed a model to the RAPID system is with the RAPID_model::AddTri() member function which takes the vertex coordinates of a triangle, and an id number.
3. RAPID operates only with triangles. If your models contain polygons with more than 3 vertices, you will have to triangulate them yourself, and feed the triangles to RAPID. Convex polygons are trivial to triangularize, but if you want a more sophisticated approach, you can find triangulation code for polygons.
4. RAPID has just one collision query function: Collide().
5. Unlike I_COLLIDE, RAPID does not keep track of where the objects are. You must specify where the objects are in world space on every collision query.
6. I_COLLIDE can report distances between models. On the other hand, RAPID reports only the triangle contact pairs. Pairs of triangle id's are returned by the collision query function.
7. Unlike I_COLLIDE, RAPID makes no use of frame-to-frame coherence in the motion of objects.
8. I_COLLIDE has support for multiple object collision detection. On the other hand, RAPID contains support for pair-wise collision queries only.
Last updated on 6/10/97. Please send comments or questions to geom@cs.unc.edu.