[ODE] ODE 0.6 and Terrain

[Mark Fournier]

I notice that a lot of posters on the mailing list seem to have worked
terrain or heightmaps into collision detection, and I'm wondering how they
did it. I'm hoping that, in some cases at least, it wasn't simply the raw
conversion of the terrain mesh or heightmap into a trimesh.

I had my own system with 0.5 which consisted of converting a heightmap into
a trimesh, but this relied on hybrid trees and a method for saving and
restoring a preprocessed mesh (building the trimesh could take up to 10
seconds for a 512 x 512 tile heightmap with up to 64 polys per tile, and
using other tree types could take up to 20 megs while the hybrid tree did it
in 2 megs or less.) I would like to modify the ODE code so that I can just
submit a heightmap to ODE and have it calculate the polys as needed--this
would allow us to have a dynamically changing heightmap.

So, if you didn't use pregenerated trimeshes, how did you do it?