ODE Tutorial

This tutorial explains the basics of ODE through the construction of a simple applications that displays cubes falling on the ground.

Preliminary setup

Discovering the QGLViewer

We are going to use ODE for the physics and a very handy library for OpenGL display of the physic simulation, named QGLViewer. This library is based on Qt and encapsulates a viewer for rendering and manipulating (flying through, rotating with a trackball,...) a 3D scene. There are excellent tutorials on the web site, so I just present here the very fundamentals of the library.

Here is for example a simple viewer that shows a ball whose color is changing over the time.