Geometry importing/expo using STereoLithography (.stl) file?

[dcombest]

Hello,

I'm completely new to bullet physics and trying to figure out if it will be useful for my research. I am trying to build a rigid body simulation and then extract the resulting surface to perform further fluid simulation using another software I have written. In order to build the objects in bullet, is there support for .stl (aka Stereolithography formatted http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STL_(file_format) ) files? If not then I could write one and I think it would be a nice addition to the library for complex objects drawn using CAD programs. Also, of course an exporter to the .stl format would be nice as well. If you know if this exists already, or know of other formats that can be imported from CAD then I would greatly appreciate the feedback. Thanks for your time and have a great weekend!

Dan

[Adler]

AFAIK there is no support for STL. One Reason maybe that STL may store Triangular patches but may also store spline representations. Bullet is targeting game and movies where the import of spline based models can be handled from modelling software. There is no need to integrate triangulation algorithms to the engine because this is a little off-topic for a physic engine. This maybe a task for a graphic engine or a modelling tool.

The contanct algorithms are using primitives and not parametric surfaces (NURBS, Bezier-Patches).

Hope this helps but maybe somebody else could confirm my arguments...

Greetings