Soft Bodies

Since Bullet physics engine added soft body support that brings the number of publicly freely available physics engines that have soft body support to 3. PhysX, OpenTissue and Bullet. So that seemed like enough to justify adding softbody support to PAL.

PAL now supports cloth/patch based soft bodies, and tetrahedral deformable bodies.

Bullet has basically designed the softbody system as completely separate from the rigid body system, so this makes it a great system to abstract since it will make it possible to implement a softbody system that does not directly rely on the underlying physisc engine, bringing softbodies to ODE, Newton, and friends that do not have it yet. Same plan is for the SPH fluid code I've written, but those are both still on the TODO list to integrate to PAL.

Of course, the remaining issue is how to generate the tetrahedral descriptions.


Some options I've investigated:

• The PhysXViewer should be able to do it.
  
• Apparently Qhull can generate tetrahedron (how convenient!) using the 'qhull d QJ i' option. This would be a good option since Qhull is a widely employed library.
  
• TetGen, seems to be a rather large library, given its special purpose nature (generating tetrahedron), but says it is optimized for finite volume/element methods.
  
• GNU Triangulated Surface Library says it can create tetrahedra, but I'm not sure if this is only for isosurfaces.
  
• NETGEN claims to create tetrahedral meshes from CSG
  
• Cubit is a massive library from sandia that claims to generate tetrahedral meshes.
  
• libmesh can work with tet4, but I've not investigated what inputs it can take.
  

And during my googling I came across SLFFEA an open source finite element analysis tool. Cool!