Abstract :

This paper presents a method to compute the shortest (geodesic) distance between two given points in a polyhedral solid. The basic difference between the shortest and the geodesic shortest distance is that, in shortest distance between two points in a graph is the shortest path length connecting those two points while geodesic shortest distance between two points is the curvilinear distance measured along the shape (curvature) of the solid. The previous proposed methods are rather complicated, this method is rather simple since it uses square mesh system instead of triangular mesh and also provides a graphical method to calculate the shortest distance. This process can be used to calculate the distance between two points on solids of any size using a suitable scaling factor.