I lately integrated Bullet Physics into my little game engine, but for now I only use basic shapes as spheres or boxes for collision checks. For more realistic physics I need collision meshes for all models in the scene. They should be much simpler and in lower detail than the actual model for drawing to speed up computations.
Since I want adding new asserts to the engine as easy as possible, I am looking for a way to automatically generate collision meshes. I could just use the actual mesh loaded from file and that would result in very realistic physics calculations but that won't be fast enough. Therefore, how can I generate low detail collision meshes from a given set of vertices?
This task doesn't seem trivial since there many different cases to handle. For example a model of a house with furniture must retain details of floor and door frames while ornaments should be removed. I believe there already was research on this topic, but I couldn't find anything useful yet.