Physics Simulation Forum

Hello,

We've been making progress on our OpenCL SPH fluid simulator and it's about time to start thinking of better integration with Bullet! I've got some very rudimentary collision detection (using ray-triangle test and repulsion forces) to allow particles to be affected by rigid bodies. While this should be improved from the fluid's point of view, it would also be great to affect the rigid bodies somehow.

Is there any suggested reading or hints at where to get started with Bullet to make this happen? I've read in the literature one approach using impulses to couple SPH and rigid bodies but from what I understand that's not how Bullet works?
I'm pretty unfamiliar with physics/collision detection terminology at the moment, so even suggesting some basic vocab that I can google and look for in the literature would be helpful.

Another approach is to model rigid bodies with particles and solve for their forces within the SPH system (using springs to keep them rigid), while this has shown some good results, it does not seem ideal from a performance perspective and I'm hoping similar effects can be achieved using existing Bullet physics.

Thank you
Ian 'enjalot' Johnson
http://enja.org