quote:Original post by Eelco
yeah its a sigma. it stand for summation, sort of numerical integration.

If you leave out the "sort of numerical integration," that statement would be correct.

[edited by - unferth on October 26, 2003 1:34:47 PM]

quote:Original post by Eelco
yeah its a sigma. it stand for summation, sort of numerical integration. no offence, but seeing the nature of your questions i indeed wouldnt bother with integration: no matter how smart you are, its not going to be a thing youll just figure out in a couple of hours. and besides, as i said, the whole integrating thing is very theoretical, since you ''never'' have a nice function describing your model, but rather an irregular mesh.
so the numerical summation on finitly small elements is the best way to go, and requires only knowledge about finding an average.

<i>Physics for Game Developers</i> says the opposite. They say that b/c your meshes are so complex, and b/c they might be non-rigid, or b/c moments of inertia might change, it''s best to use integration of bouding shapes, which they go over. It would be a lot faster to calculate the moment of inertia of a cylinder than iterating over 100s of vertices to get something that''s most accurate, when the object isn''t real in the first place.