Rigid body simulation of helical gears/oblique pressure vectors I have two meshes of helical gears.
I tried to simulate their motion using rigid body physics. Both gears have hinges connected to a static mesh, and one of them has a motor.
When I press play, the gears just seem to jam and glitch into each other:

There is a wide margin between the gear teeth:

Very similar gears with the same mechanics but straighter teeth work just fine as a rigid body simulation:

The helical gears are able to move just fine when they are separated, so I assume I have set up the rigid body constraints sensibly:

(The rear one has a hinge and a motor. The foreground one has only a hinge, but is able to interact correctly and spin when receiving an impulse from a colliding cube.)
The collision type on all gear is set to 'MESH'. The collision margin is 0.0, but increasing it (within the available space) does not seem to help. The teeth look quite thin, but thicker teeth (with the same clearance as in the working example) didn't work either, and in any case these thin teeth are able to interact with the falling cube above.
Increasing the simulation's substeps and iterations and decreasing its speed doesn't seem to help. In fact, by drastically increasing the substeps and iterations to 60 and decreasing the speed by 1000X to 0.001, I can see that the gears invariably end up with their teeth aligned and clipped into each other after just one or two frames:

The meshs are all fully manifold, and the normals are all facing outward.
Why is this not working?
I don't have the technical knowledge to explain why, but the Bullet physics library seems to like denser meshes.

Subdividing the tooth surfaces 4 times (equivalent to 15 cuts) made these gears work.