Collision trees (unified vs division)

[starstutter]

Hi. I am getting familiar with collision trees. They are a terrific so far, and I am designing a system to use them with optimization in mind. I'd like too ask about the performance implications of dividing a (moderate sized) world up into small chunks of static geometry or keeping it in one larger piece. Now, this may seem like a dumb question to those who have access to the workings of the system and usually it's far more efficient to break things into smaller pieces, but I want to make sure before I design an overly-complex world-divider.

1. Which is the more efficient method?

2. What is the performance gain/loss? (percentage estimates would be terrific)

3. Do larger amounts of diverse materials (say 20-30) have large performance penalties if they are used on the same tree?

Thanks for any answers. I did comb through the wiki and came up with some hints that the tree can be very large, but nothing that explicitly says that's a good idea.

[Sury]

I don't really understand what you are asking.
You said that your world is moderate sized, so just send all of it's faces to a collision tree. Newton is responsible for dividing the physics world internaly for it's needs. That's why it's called a 'tree". Be sure however to set the limits of the Newton world a bit larger then your geometry world(the min,max vectors) so it doesn't populate large portions of the world with emply nodes or something. That's how it was before, maybe that is optimized now.
Or maybe you are asking, should you divide your world in several collion trees, or just one big tree ?

[starstutter]

I don't really understand what you are asking.
You said that your world is moderate sized, so just send all of it's faces to a collision tree. Newton is responsible for dividing the physics world internaly for it's needs.

Yup. that's exactly what I was asking . Thanks for the answer.

Or maybe you are asking, should you divide your world in several collion trees, or just one big tree ?

That is part of the question as well. Is there any advantage to doing this?