Calculating an AABB for a transformed sphere

Question

I have a sphere represented in object space by a center point and a radius. The sphere is transformed into world space with a transformation matrix that may include scales, rotations, and translations. I need to build a axis aligned bounding box for the sphere in world space, but I'm not sure how to do it.

Here is my current approach, that works for some cases:

public void computeBoundingBox() {
    // center is the middle of the sphere
    // averagePosition is the middle of the AABB
    // getObjToWorldTransform() is a matrix from obj to world space
    getObjToWorldTransform().rightMultiply(center, averagePosition);

    Point3 onSphere = new Point3(center);
    onSphere.scaleAdd(radius, new Vector3(1, 1, 1));
    getObjToWorldTransform().rightMultiply(onSphere);

    // but how do you know that the transformed radius is uniform?
    double transformedRadius = onSphere.distance(averagePosition);

    // maxBound is the upper limit of the AABB
    maxBound.set(averagePosition);
    maxBound.scaleAdd(transformedRadius, new Vector3(1, 1, 1));

    // minBound is the lower limit of the AABB
    minBound.set(averagePosition);
    minBound.scaleAdd(transformedRadius, new Vector3(-1,-1,-1));
}

However, I am skeptical that this would always work. Shouldn't it fail for non-uniform scaling?

Answer 1

@comingstorm's answer is great but can be simplified a lot. If M is the sphere's transformation matrix, indexed from 1, then

x = M[1,4] +/- sqrt(M[1,1]^2 + M[1,2]^2 + M[1,3]^2)
y = M[2,4] +/- sqrt(M[2,1]^2 + M[2,2]^2 + M[2,3]^2)
z = M[3,4] +/- sqrt(M[3,1]^2 + M[3,2]^2 + M[3,3]^2)

(This assumes the sphere had radius 1 and its center at the origin before it was transformed.)

I wrote a blog post with the proof here, which is much too long for a reasonable Stack Overflow answer.