How to do ray plane intersection?

Question

How do I calculate the intersection between a ray and a plane?

Code

This produces the wrong results.

float denom = normal.dot(ray.direction         


        

Answer 1

As wonce commented, you want to also allow the denominator to be negative, otherwise you will miss intersections with the front face of your plane. However, you still want a test to avoid a division by zero, which would indicate the ray being parallel to the plane. You also have a superfluous negation in your computation of t. Overall, it should look like this:

float denom = normal.dot(ray.direction);
if (abs(denom) > 0.0001f) // your favorite epsilon
{
    float t = (center - ray.origin).dot(normal) / denom;
    if (t >= 0) return true; // you might want to allow an epsilon here too
}
return false;