bbinertia.docVIP

How to find the inertia tensor (or other mass properties) of a 3D solid body represented by a triangle mesh (Draft) Jonathan Blow, Atman J Binstock 9 July 2004 Abstract We show how to find the mass, center-of-mass and inertia tensor for a solid body of constant density represented by a polygonal mesh, using relatively simple math (no Green’s Theorem or anything like that). This is a terse treatment of the algorithm, designed for readers who are already familiar with the basic ideas.  Overview of Algorithm The algorithm works as follows: 1) Choose an arbitrary reference point (perhaps the origin) 2) For each triangle in the mesh: 3) Form the tetrahedron defined by that triangle and the reference point 4) Compute the covariance of the tetrahedron (by mapping a known canonical tetrahedron through an affine transform) 5) Add this covariance to an accumulator 6) Convert the accumulator from covariance matrix to inertia tensor  The Inertia Tensor as Modified Covariance The Tensor of Inertia of a solid body can be expressed as: where 13 is the 3x3 identity matrix and C is the mass-weighted covariance of the body: We will focus on finding C for a closed, simple polyhedron. Given C, we can easily convert to I using equation 1. The Covariance of a Canonical Tetrahedron The algorithm wants us to find the covariance of a set of arbitrary tetrahedra. The most straightforward way to compute the covariance of a tetrahedron is by solving a slightly messy integral equation. Instead, to simplify the math, we solve for the covariance of a canonical tetrahedron, for which the integral is simple. Then, we map that tetrahedron to the target via an affine transform, which yields the desired covariance. Our canonical tetrahedron has 4 vertices v0 = (0, 0, 0), v1 = (1, 0, 0), v2 = (0, 1, 0), v3 = (0, 0, 1). To find its covariance, we convert equation 2 to continuous form:  where ρ is the density of the body, which is constant, so it factors