[ODE] trimesh and making your own mesh

[matt herb]

There's absolutely no math involved in taking data from exported mesh; and
feeding it to tri-mesh. The exported mesh is a bunch of vertices (that, 
among
other things, have their xyz positions), and a bunch faces (usually
triangles). Now, tri-mesh needs a bunch of vertices (xyz's), and a bunch of
triangles (that is, 3 vertex indices for each triangle). So, your task is
just to route that data. No math :)

ok.. I guess you are right...

but if I  wanted to represent object as a TRIMESH .. what about collision?  
if there is no trimesh-->trimesh collision detection then I guess trimesh is 
really only useful for representing the land geometry right?


Using only meshes has it's problems (eg. mesh-mesh collision is easy, but
finding contact points/normals/depths is extremely hard, especially for
realtime). BTW, ODE doesn't have this yet (mesh-mesh collision).

oh you answered my question :0

But it makes sense to have mesh-sphere, mesh-box etc. collisions. The most
widely used case in games is having mesh for "the level", and using
spheres/capsules/boxes for "actors" (humans, vehicles, bullets etc.).

I reply to messages before I read it all.. so I guess im right.. in that 
case is there any example
code out there showing how to concert say.. a BSP map into a trimesh ?


>I figure 5 years from now we will be using near exact representations for 
>the mesh rather than boxes

I guess we're already doing this for several years :)

well I mean for everything in the scene.. or actually it would make sense to 
have a system which gauges your system speed and then creates the underlying 
geometry according... slow system.. then objects are representing as boxes..

there would need to be something in place where I could send ODE(?) my mesh 
before the program starts and elimates some vertices and sends the results 
back to me which I then use as my tri mesh ?

There are "tests" in ODE, they can serve as tutorials... And there are docs
for ODE, so you've got everything you need :)


well im not near as smart as all of you.. but im trying


Aras Pranckevicius aka NeARAZ
http://www.gim.ktu.lt/nesnausk/nearaz/



http://www.badwedding.com for music
http://www.punkouter.com for software

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