How to draw/render a Bullet Physics collision body/shape?

Question

I have implemented the Bullet Physics engine into my android program with the NDK (I am using Vuforia's imagetarget example for android), and it is set up and working correctly, however I would like to render/draw my collision boxes/planes to see my rigid bodies (btRigidBody)/collision shapes (btCollisionShape), I'm positive this is possible but I can't find any tutorials on how to do it!

I have taken the hello world Bullet physics tutorial on their wiki page and modified it to apply the transformations from the falling physics body to a 3d object I have in opengl es 2.0 to view the collision bodies, here is the code I am using to render to object:

void drawRigidBody(btRigidBody* body,QCAR::Matrix44F modelViewMatrix, unsigned int textureID)
{
btTransform trans;
body->getMotionState()->getWorldTransform(trans);
    LOG("sphere pos: (x %f , y %f, z %f)",trans.getOrigin().getX(),trans.getOrigin().getY(),trans.getOrigin().getZ());


    float physicsMatrix[16];
    trans.getOpenGLMatrix(physicsMatrix);

    SampleUtils::scalePoseMatrix(kObjectScale, kObjectScale, kObjectScale,
            &modelViewMatrix.data[0]);

    QCAR::Matrix44F modelViewProjection, objectMatrix;
    SampleUtils::multiplyMatrix(&modelViewMatrix.data[0], physicsMatrix, &objectMatrix.data[0]);
    SampleUtils::multiplyMatrix(&projectionMatrix.data[0], &objectMatrix.data[0], &modelViewProjection.data[0]);



    glVertexAttribPointer(vertexHandle, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0,
            (const GLvoid*) &signVerts[0]);
    glVertexAttribPointer(normalHandle, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0,
            (const GLvoid*) &signNormals[0]);
    glVertexAttribPointer(textureCoordHandle, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0,
            (const GLvoid*) &signTexCoords[0]);

    glEnableVertexAttribArray(vertexHandle);
    glEnableVertexAttribArray(normalHandle);
    glEnableVertexAttribArray(textureCoordHandle);

    glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0);
    glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureID);
    glUniformMatrix4fv(mvpMatrixHandle, 1, GL_FALSE,
            (GLfloat*)&modelViewProjection.data[0] );
    glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, signNumVerts);
}

EDIT: looking at the code for btBoxShape i noticed you can grab the box vertices and normals:

btVector3** vertices= wallShape->getVertices();
btVector3**normals = wallShape->getNormals();

but you can't grab a list of indices to draw the vertex points in a certain order!

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 16 '12 at 16:58

If I recall correctly, this is not the proper way to draw debug shapes in Bullet. Did you read the user manual (PDF), page 16?

You are supposed to implement your own debug drawer class which implements btIDebugDraw, and in this class you implement the drawLine method.

You pass this debug drawer to bullet with setDebugDrawer, and then enable it with world->getDebugDrawer->setDebugMode(debugMode);

To draw the world, call world->debugDrawWorld();

This then calls drawLine on your custom function numerous times until a wireframe model of the physics world has been drawn.

This looks like it's what I need, thanks for the pointer! Unfortunately my C++ is rusty (being an android developer I've been primarily programming in java) I've been getting by with code snippets for the NDK stuff but looks like i'm going to have to brush up to write proper C++ classes — AndroidNoob, Aug 17 '12 at 11:32

How to draw/render a Bullet Physics collision body/shape?

1 Answers1