new vehicle demo

[Sam_Horton]

for your driving pleasure!
HumVee demo (http://shorton.phpwebhosting.com)

[wowens]

Great job!

Did you use the Havok plug-in for the physics simulation. If so, how did you create the vehicle's suspension? Are the wheels motion animated or control by the simulation?

I tried using Havok's file from the Raycast Car demo but could not get the wheels to attach to the chassis properly. Could you provide any assistance?

[Sam_Horton]

Thanks Wowens!

The vehicle is set up and controled through Havok. Each wheel has a linear dashpot associated w/ it that connects it to the chasis. The real trick is to use sphere proxy models to simulate the wheels as opposed to the actual wheel geometry. Once you get this set up you can then apply forces to either the chasis or even better, apply individual forces to each wheel. The most difficult/tedious part will be tweaking the small values trying to get something that looks good and is fun to drive. Ours still has much tweaking before it will be usable in a game.

That raycast car demo is cool if you want to put a car in a box and drive around and bump into stuff, but it uses the modelsUnderRay command, which is usually just too slow for any real application. Our goal is to get something similar to the WartHog in Halo. (the coolest vehicle ever created imho)

[mdoyle]

hi Sam,

I quite like it. The textures for the terrain are pretty cool. How big a is it when published? I tried to create something similar using havoc but found quite a few problems with the scaling issue from lightwave to director and found that for suspension and springs on some things were just too much. We tried to animate a wee characters head in a car bouncing along using havoc but it just went really bad.

I ended up using raycast but have found that it does kind of grind to a halt on slower machines when there are quite a few collisions. I was getting about 14 fps if I was lucky on a 800mhz pc. I'll get it published and post it up later today,

Also, I don't know it is just me but do any you have problems with textures in w3d's out of lightwave with Ati cards? In the car thing I have done the textures on the car are sometimes replaced by the surroung textures (like the road and stuff). I don't know if it is because you can select what kind of texture you want in for the car before you race and it replaces the textures with another w3d (with just textures in it) if that makes sense. Any ideas?

M

[Sam_Horton]

Thanks Mdoyle!

as of now the whole shockwave file is about 1 meg due to the fact that their are 2 1024x1024 textures in there. As far as the Lightwave scaling issue goes, if you model everything in centimeter scale you will be fine. Lightwave exports are exactly 100 times larger than Director's scaling system (I know maya has this same problem so it makes me think that it's more of a max and director problem rather than a lightwave one).

You texture issue sounds strange, as I have never once had a problem with them exporting incorrectlly. This is one area where lightwave seems to be strong. I do use UV mapping for all texturing except tiled terrain textures (not sure if that has anything to do w/ it or not). It sounds like it's definitely an issue with the texture swapping thing you have going on.

[mdoyle]

I have used 1024 textures before as well but read that some graphics cards can't handle it and that it would change to software renderer to cope, which would slow it down and sometimes crash.

I did have problems with those size of textures before too and found that some graphics cards coudln't render cos I had to make sure it would work on a rangeof machines. I think it is the swapping texture scripting but it only seems to be on ati cards. N vidia are totally fine. They are not uv mapped but just mapped planar on an axis then exported out of lightwave as just textures and then director will just swap them when you choose which one you want.

I found that using UV maps make the file size bigger in what I have done so far. Is that just coincidence? or can I not get round that.