[ODE] Collision with Quake or Skeletal type models...

[Richard Tonge]

Hi Andy, Dominique

>It can however be very time consuming and error prone
>to attempt to describe any system of even reasonable
>complexity using source code.

Yes, setting up skeletons in source is hard. Using a
physics authoring tool is much easier.

>You may even be able to use something like havok and
>3dsmax to generate your data model but then actually
>drive the system with ODE.  This would be an amusing
>hack since your runtime could remain open source.

Yes, using Havok authored data to drive the ODE
runtime is an interesting idea, however I can see a
few problems.
1 3DSmax and the Havok plugin (or the new combined
product) are expensive if you dont already own them.
2 The Havok physics model is quite different from the
ODE physics model, so any tuning parameters you set at
authoring time wont necessarily have the same effect
at run time. Some joints parameters in Havok might not
have equivalents in ODE.
3 The Havok file format is binary, so you would have
to reverse engineer it.

Have any of you guys seen KAT, the physics authoring
tool that comes free with Unreal Tournament 2003?
It is a standalone tool, so you dont need max. It was
specifically designed for authoring physics, so its
interface is much simpler than max's. Its file format
is an XML formatted text file, so you wouldnt need to
reverse engineer it to use it with ODE. It comes with
all the physics data used to make UT2003 in the XML
format which you are free to edit. 

Also, it is based on MathEngine Karma, which has
similar ancestry to ODE. This means that many tuning
parameters behave in the same way. For example ERP and
CFM in ODE are exactly the same as gamma and epsilon
in Karma. This means that a skeleton tuned in KAT
should behave similarly in ODE. 

Richard Tonge
PS2 Optimisation Engineer
MathEngine

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