Extending Bullet: static Distance Field vs. rigid-bodies

[Spacecookies]

Hi all,

I'm investigating the possibility of extending Bullet to perform static signed Distance Field vs. rigid-body collisions. (Essentially the signed Distance Field is a function that takes a 3D point in space and returns a float representing the distance from that point to the nearest surface). I'm hoping someone with more Bullet experience could provide a little discussion about how this might be best added to the library. What class to extend, what are the challenges going to be? etc.

A quick look at the API leads me to extending btConcaveShape. The processAllTriangles() interface is perhaps not the best way to handle this though. I'd rather not be discretizing the field into triangles if I can avoid it - even if this means I'm limited to Distance Field vs. simple convex shapes (like spheres).

In searching these forums I found an old reference to bullet's softbody implementation. Is it still true that the softbody implementation uses Distance Fields? This might be a possible avenue for me to explore.

Thanks for any thoughts - I appreciate it,
Spacecookies