[ODE] Sphere-trimesh issues

[John Donovan]

Hi all,
I have a simple scene of a trimesh bowl (actually the sum of two cosines
inverted) about 100 units on a side, and a sphere with a mass of 1, and
radius of 5.
When I drop the sphere into the bowl, the sphere rolls around auite
convincingly, but will tend to embed itself in a triangle. It looks like
ODE is only doing collisions on the edges of the triangles and not the
faces, because the sphere will settle down wedged into a triangle.
I have a fine-grained fixed timestep (I've tried from 0.01 to 0.003 with
both dWorldStep() and dWorldQuickStep()), and tried various ERP and CFM
values, but with little difference.
I wondered if ODE was calculating face normals incorrectly, so I
generated my own face normals, but discovered that
dGeomTriMeshDataBuildSingle1() is in the header, but isn't implemented
in the dll! I'm using the win32 binaries of version 0.5 with MSVC 7.0

On a slightly different note, has anyone tried using the SOLID collision
detection library with ODE? I've thought about using that with the same
test-case to see if ODE was generating incorrect contact joints or
somesuch. It also handles convex hulls, which sounds quite appealing.

John Donovan

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