Hi folks,
I'm doing a physics simulation that is a pile of bricks falling onto a ground plane. I have the simulation working OK, but some of the bricks end up intersecting each other at the end of the simulation. I've been all over the web trying to find a solution to this, without any luck. Does anyone have any experience of this? I'm thinking it's probably a setting I need to adjust, but it seems that getting good, solid facts about this sort of stuff is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

You might try messing with the collision bounds setting:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/File:Hardbodies_logicbuttons.png

I've also had things collide more accurately by adding more vertices, but that may only apply to softbodies. (yeah, there are 2 different collision systems. argh.)

Do you mean changing it from bounding box to something else?
With 400 bricks in the simulation, that's going to be fun - not.
Really? Adding vertices improves the accuracy of the simulation?

I'd do it with a couple test bricks first before doing it on 400 of them, I'm not very convinced my suggestions will be at all useful, you're right about this sort of thing being a needle in a haystack :unsure:  I've had adding more vertices help with cloth and softbody collisions, but I really don't know if it does for the regular physics engine.  Might be worth a shot with a little test animation, though.

If it's a rendered animation, you could also run the simulation, bake it, and then tweak the problematic bricks afterwards.

Yes, adding more geometry for soft body simulations makes sense, but I really can't see it applying to rigid bodies, although this is the first simulation I've ever run. I think I can see an addiction starting to form.

I've baked the animation at 200 degrees for 2 hours and it's nice and crispy on top. On the whole, the animation looks quite good. Bullet is an amazing piece of work. I'll try some other ideas and keep digging for solid, useful information.

Why are so many Blender tutorials so shallow, I wonder?

 It might be because it gets updated so often--which is generally a good thing, but tutorials get old fast.