How to prevent colliders from passing through each other?

I have a pinball prototype that also gave me much trouble in the same areas. These are all the steps I've taken to almost (but not yet entirely) solve these problems:

For fast moving objects:

• Set the rigidbody's Interpolate to 'Interpolate' (this does not affect the actual physics simulation, but updates the rendering of the object properly - use this only on important objects from a rendering point of view, like the player, or a pinball, but not for projectiles)

• Set Collision Detection to Continuous Dynamic

• Attach the script DontGoThroughThings (https://www.auto.tuwien.ac.at/wordpress/?p=260) to your object. This script cleverly uses the Raycasting solution I posted in my other answer to pull back offending objects to before the collision points.

In Edit -> Project Settings -> Physics:

• Set Min Penetration for Penalty to a very low value. I've set mine to 0.001

• Set Solver Iteration Count to a higher value. I've set mine to 50, but you can probably do ok with much less.

All that is going to have a penalty in performace, but that's unavoidable. The defaults values are soft on performance but are not really intented for proper simulation of small and fast-moving objects.

How about set the Collision Detection of rigidbody to Continuous or Continuous Dynamic?

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/class-Rigidbody.html

Collision with fast-moving objects is always a problem. A good way to ensure that you detect all collision is to use Raycasting instead of relying on the physics simulation. This works well for bullets or small objects, but will not produce good results for large objects. http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Physics.Raycast.html

Pseudo-codeish (I don't have code-completion here and a poor memory):

void FixedUpdate()
{
    Vector3 direction = new Vector3(transform.position - lastPosition);
    Ray ray = new Ray(lastPosition, direction);
    RaycastHit hit;
    if (Physics.Raycast(ray, hit, direction.magnitude))
    {
        // Do something if hit
    }

    this.lastPosition = transform.position;
}