General questions for a thesis work

[francesco.fz]

Hi,
I'm a student at "Università di Napoli Federico II". I'm working on a thesis, regarding surgical simulation. I would be very grateful if you could give me some informations about Bullet.

Which kind of models for deformable object are available in Bullet? (Mass-Spring Model, Finite Elements, linear finite elements, co-rotational finite elements, non-linar finite elements, Boundary element or others)

What are the main Bullet applications? (videogame, animation, physical simulation, surgical simulation or others)

Does Bullet use any graphic libraires? If yes, which one?

I hope you can answer my questions. Thanks.

Kind regards.
Francesco

[Basroil]

For deformable body simulation in surgery applications, bullet is not something that would be recommended. You'll need a more accurate/robust method (usually ansys+opentissue) and a hell of a lot of computing power. http://scc.ist.hokudai.ac.jp/publicatio ... ons-e.html has a few publications on the subject you should check out. When I visited their lab, they had a server system with about a dozen blades and maybe two dozen graphics cards in order to run ~30fps simulations in a 15cm x15cm x15cm space, so it's definitely not a one man project.

[francesco.fz]

Thank you for the answer and the advices. It's important to know that I can exclude to use Bullet for surgical simulation. Anyway I can insert it in the state of the art of the available physics engines. Can you tell me something about the models for deformable objects available in Bullet? (MSM, FEM, co-rotational FEM).
Thank you.