Some questions about CartWheel

[Herleson Pontes]

Hello Everybody,

I'm Herleson Pontes, a master degree student of Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil.
I'm researching about Dynamic Engines and Animation Environments, and I
found your article at ACM SIGGRAPH. I'm really interested about CartWheel,
and I have some questions about this project:

- It uses ODE as the Physical Engine? If yes, why?

- Is CartWheel extensible like Shapiro's DANCE?

- Is there any documentation explaining how CartWheel works and how build
it?

That's all for now. I'm really excited about CartWheel, but I found less
documentation and I'm sorry if these questions are more technical.

Thanks for your attention and patient. I'm looking forward for an answer.

Regards,

Herleson Pontes

[Stelian Coros]

Hey there,

I'll try to answer your questions below.

> - It uses ODE as the Physical Engine? If yes, why?

It does make use of ODE. There is no particular reason why that is,
and we could have used other physics engines instead, but we had to
choose one. As much as possible I wrote the code so that it doesn't
depend on any ODE specific functions, so in theory, it should be quite
easy to plug in a different physics engine instead.

> - Is CartWheel extensible like Shapiro's DANCE?

I am not familiar with the DANCE framework. Our code primarily serves
as an implementation guideline for the SIGGRAPH paper though, and not
as a general-purpose control/physics simulation framework.

> - Is there any documentation explaining how CartWheel works and how build
> it?

There isn't much documentation on the code itself (the control
framework is explained in detail in the SIGGRAPH paper, but without
any specific implementation details), though the code is pretty well
commented, so it shouldn't be too hard to get into it.

Hope this helps,
Stelian