Fw: [ODE] Re: Heightfield / Collision.

[gl]

(d'oh - sent this to skjold directly).
--
gl

> > The actual heightfield is a 'sampling' at some resolution, that
represents
> a smooth, unfaceted terrain. Isn't it possible to test for intersections
> against some form of interpolation function (e.g. bilinear or bicubic),
> instead of triangles? Wouldn't colliding against a relief made of
triangles
> cause unexpected bouncing behaviour that awkwardly gives away this
> granularity?
>
> That assumes that you only want smooth, rolling hills, but that isn't
> necesarily the case, at least not for everyone.  Cliffs, craters,
> non-organic terrain (perhaps as extreme as Marble Madness with deliberate
> faceting) etc. should all be possible.  The terrain may also be
deformable,
> and I don't think you'd want to recompute splines etc (although maybe you
> could).  Basically we're shooting for a fairly general and flexible
> heightfield solution.
>
> Also, don't forget that your collision heightmap may be far more detailed
> than what you draw - the collision data represents the full resolution
> source, your drawn data may be level-of-detailed etc.  And with hardware
> vertex acceleration now wide spread, pumping large amounts of triangles is
> not only viable, but actually good for vertex throughput (modern cards
hate
> having to draw small vertex counts per rendering call).
> --
> gl
>