Separating Axis Theorem - Calculate Normals from Points in 3D

Question

So while researching for a method to detect collisions in a 3D space between (arbitrary rotated) boxes, I stumbled upon this excellent question with great resources for my further research and great answers: How many and which axes to use for 3D OBB collision with SAT

I now managed to implement nearly everything in C++, and I understand why I have to check all 15 axis and why they are important. Yet I don't understand, how to calculate a0, a1, a2, b0, b1 and b2 (the normals of A and B). Since I only have cuboids for collision detection, I would rather use normals instead of the edges. It does seem to be easier.

To be more precise: First of all, my data structure to save a OBB is a loose collection of 8 vertices of the cuboid 1]. I understand, how to calculate a normal mathematically. I just calculate the cross product of two edges... But I don't know which two edges to choose. If I look at a face of the cubiod, I have 4 edges I could use to calculate the normal for that face. Another problem is, that using the above mentioned data structure, I can't tell whether two vertices belong to one face.

So what can I do to get the 3 normals of a cuboid programmatically?

Do I have to expand my data structure, or can the missing information be derived somehow in a easy way?

1] Example for a cuboid in my data structure (represented in JSON, with (x,y,z) being a point in double^3):

[(0,0,0), (0,1,0), (1,0,1), (1,1,1), (0,1,1), (1,1,0), (1,0,0), (0,0,1)]

Answer 1

I now managed to solve the problem by myself. I changed my data structure, so that the normals are saved separately. When initializing the cuboid, I know what vertices belong to which surface. I then just take three vertices (namely p_1, p_2, p_3) of one surface (for example the surface which faces to positive x). The three vertices form a triangle on the surface. Now let p_2 be the vertex which is at the right angle of the triangle. Then I proceed to calculate the edges with:

e_1 = p_1 - p_2

e_2 = p_3 - p_2

Now the normal can be calculated with n_x = e_1 x e_2 (x = cross product)

The normals n_y and n_z can be calculated accordingly. I then just save the normals in the data structure and use them later when the collision detection begins.

I think that it would have been to complicated to calculate the normals with a loose collection of points, since the cuboids could have an arbitrary rotation. Thats why I rather changed the data structure.

Technically, this doesn't answer the whole question, since I didn't manage to calculate the normal by just using the collection of points where I don't know which point belongs to which surface, but I spent a lot of time and I think that it is not efficiently possible, though I cannot prove this statement.