Physics Simulation Forum

This is interesting movie about game physics in next Star Wars movie:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/29964.html

About a year ago, I ran into an ex-coworker artist who is working there now. He talked a little about the DMM (digital molecular modeling) and how they had to make sure the meshes were closed (might not be the right terminology, I mean they had to enclose a volume without any holes to the outside). And then I believe the DMM tech took it from there ... probably breaking it up into tetrahedrons or some other element, but it wasn't clear if they did this on the fly or not.

Anyway, that movie looks pretty dang good in my opinion.

According to the DMM website (http://www.pixeluxentertainment.com/tech.htm, particularly the "Automatic Level Of Detail" section) they store a "volumetric archetype" which appears to be some sort of Octree/Implicit Surface approach. The wording of the LOD section also seems to imply that it's an offline process, otherwise I imagine they would probably make some sort of claim about "Continuous LOD" capability.