Collisions in a real world application

The most common approaches used in many current AAA games is "k-DOP" simplified collision for StaticMeshes, and a simplified physical body representation for the SkeletalMeshes.

If you google for "kDOP collision" or "discrete orientation polytopes" you should find enough references. This is basicly a bounding volume defined of several planes that are moved from outside towards the mesh, until a triangle collision occurs. The "k" in kDOP defines how many of these planes are used, and depending on your geometry and your "k" you can get really good approximations.

For SkeletalMeshes the most common technique is to define simple geometry that is attached to specific bones. This geometry might be a box or a sphere. This collision-model than can be used for quite accurate collision detection of animated meshes.

If you need per-triangle collision, the "Separating Axis Theorem" is the google-search term of your choice. This is usefull for specific cases, but 75% of your collision-detection needs should be covered with the above mentioned methods.

Keep in mind, that you most probably will need a higher level of early collision rejection than a bounding-volume. As soon as you have a lot of objects in the world, you will need to use a "spatial partitioning" to reject groups of objects from further testing as early as possible.

Prior to doing complex collision detection you should perform basic detection.

Using spheres or rectangles as bounding volumes is your best bet. Then if this detects a collision, move onto your more complex methods.

What I'm getting at is simple is often better, and quicker. Wrapping bounding volumes and splitting meshes up is costly, not to mention complex. You seem to be on the right track though.

As with game programming there are multiple ways of collision detection. My advice would be start simple. Take a cube and perfect your routines on that, then in theory you should be able to use any other model. As for examples I'd check gamedev.net as they have some nice articles. Much or my home made collision detection is a combination of many methods, so I can't really recommended the definitive resource.

The answering question comes down to how precise do you need?

Clearly, sphere bounding boxes are the most trivial. On the other side of the scale, you have a full triangle mesh-mesh collision detection, which has to happen each time an object moves.

Game development physics engine rely on the art of the approximation(I lurked in GameDev.net's math and physics forums years ago).

My opinion is that you will need some sort of bounding ellipsoid associated with each object. An object can be a general multimesh object, a mesh, or a submesh mesh. This should provide a 'decent' amount of approximation.

Pick up Christer Ericson's book, Real-Time Collision Detection. He discusses these very issues in great detail.

When reading articles, remember that in a real-world game application you will be working under hard limits of memory and time - you get 16.6ms per frame and that's it! So be cautious of any article or paper that doesn't seriously discuss the memory and CPU footprint of its algorithm.