Given two arbitrary surfaces, what is the accurate and quite fast algo to find collision within X distance? I have two high-resolution 3D objects(femur and patella) with arbitrary smooth surface and I want to find the contact point/area between those two objects. Accuracy is more important than computation time in this case, though it would be great if the algorithm has relatively low computation time. Also, it would be great if the contact between two objects can be represented with surface/point penetration distance, e.g. if distance between two points/triangles/areas &lt;= x distance, then there is collision, while x can be non-zero. Is there any collision algorithm that satisfy above requirement?
A key search phrase is "collision detection." You may find some references at this MO posting, "Intersection of Polyhedra."
And here is a more recent reference:


  Jiménez, Juan J., and Rafael J. Segura. "Collision detection between complex polyhedra." Computers &amp; Graphics 32.4 (2008): 402-411. (Journal link.)


Google Scholar shows this has been cited by 33 papers since.