Calculate volume for convex shapes?

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Silverlan
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Oct 30, 2014 9:15 pm

Calculate volume for convex shapes?

Post by Silverlan »

I want to implement buoyancy into my program, but I've run into a bit of a problem.
I already have all of the algorithms in place, but to calculate an accurate buoyancy force I need to know the total volume of the shape for the collision object in the liquid, as well as the volume of the part of the shape that is submerged.
I can do this fine with triangle geometry, but I'm not sure what to do about convex shapes with point-clouds. I could triangulate the point-cloud offline, but that's not guaranteed to give me the same 'shape' as bullet would use.

Is there another way of doing this?
I can't find anything in bullet that could help me here, but maybe I'm missing something.
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drleviathan
Posts: 849
Joined: Tue Sep 30, 2014 6:03 pm
Location: San Francisco

Re: Calculate volume for convex shapes?

Post by drleviathan »

I don't think there is a Bullet utility for that. The good news is that you probably don't need high accuracy to get results that are "good enough" for the human eye. Unless you're working on a high-accuracy application then use an approximate method.
erbisme4@yahoo.com
Posts: 41
Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2016 2:41 pm

Re: Calculate volume for convex shapes?

Post by erbisme4@yahoo.com »

As a guestimate you could try the bbox as well as the bounding sphere for an approximation.
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