[ODE] Mixing simulation with basic keyframe data.

George McBay gfm at yahoo.com
Wed Jul 2 18:24:02 2003


I've currently got a nice, relatively stable vehicle
simulation up and running with ODE and I'm very happy
with the results -- the one sticking point I have is
with integrating very basic (non-simulated) keyframe
data with the simulation.

Right now, I'm defining my level geometry as a bunch
of bodiless geoms, which works great until I move one
of them.  I first tried to just manually update the
position and rotation of the geom based on the current
transform of the animated level geometry -- no go, my
vehicle just sort of falls through rising platforms
(and encounters other similar problems) which is
pretty much what I expected to happen when the geoms
were not attached to bodies.

My end goal is just a simple way to transfer the
position and rotation information from my animated
geometry nodes back into my ODE geoms.  I don't want
the ODE geoms I'm moving to really be impacted by the
simulation (I don't want gravity acting on them, which
is easy enough to disable, but I also don't want my
vehicle smashing into them to move them, which is a
fair bit harder, it seems).  But I also want my
vehicle to be able to impact with them, and ride on
these geoms as it currently can when they are static.

I've tried a few different things thus far and while a
couple of them kinda work, they all seem too
fragile/tweaky to really rely on.
 
I searched on the mailing list and saw some other
references to issues like this, but no definitive
answers, so I'm just posting a quick query on the
chance that maybe someone has found a robust way to
deal with this situation.    

Any suggestions/examples/other comments greatly
appreciated.


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