Bullet collision detection for 3D modeling app?

Post Reply
techmage
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2014 4:57 am

Bullet collision detection for 3D modeling app?

Post by techmage »

I am starting work on a 3D modeling application that is going to have a very niche modeling toolset.

I am at the point of dealing with picking of objects and vertices, and snapping objects to objects and all of that standard 3D app functionality.

And I then got the idea in my head that I may be able to just use a physics engine collision system to handle this, instead doing it from scratch.

But I know absolutely nothing about the bullet physics library. I have poked through the class documentation some, but can't quickly infer if bullet could be used for this.

I know of course that if you have a world of static meshes, bullet is probably awesome for collision detecting single faces or vertices. But this is a 3D modeling app I am working on, so the mesh is going to be constantly updated, and completely arbitrarily shaped. So the collision mesh will be constantly updating and changing. Given this, is investigating bullet to use in this way a path worth going down?

Excuse any ignorance these questions demonstrate, as I am not familiar with bullet at all, my familiarity is with physx, which would be pretty bad at doing this type of thing. But.
How quickly can bullet update a collision mesh? Would I have to continually submit my entire mesh to bullet for it to calculate the collision matrix to test against? Or could I submit a mesh on a triangle by triangle basis, and update each triangle individually as necessary? Would it be realistic to resubmit say some 10,000 triangles to bullet in realtime constantly?
Post Reply