ah, I get you
It would be quite straightforward to add an inner lane changing method - effectively the reverse look to what the outer lane check is doing. It might affect the real time performance a little but it is definitely worth trying
The bunching is currently based on the (hardcoded) speed of the particle at the front of each lane so it might not actually happen in a simulation. When the curve is created (using 'chord length' then this gives an overall length which the calculations use. If the default curve setting 'uniform' is used the it sets the length of the curve as 0 to 1 (instead of say 0 to 46.5 units) and this makes the vehicles speed up and slow down based on the distance between points. Once its all working I'll experiment with the uniform option so that effect becomes part of the system.
I was toying about with the requirement for some vehicles to want to leave the road at certain exits. This would be pretty similar to the opposite lane changing by adding a random 'get off at the next exit' variable. If 'on' then it keeps checking the distance to the exit and keep attempting to move to the inner lanes till it gets there, even if it started out as an outer lane speed maniac
yeah - definitely think that changing lanes to the right and left will help make this more convincing, as will adding vehicles exiting - keep at it mate - this is going to look excellent!
Mat - at the minute they just have a hardcoded lifespan. The idea being that as new ones start, old ones die and the system performance should stabilise as numbers become fairly steady. Of course if you had thousands of vehicles on a huge road then it would get very slow! (and need to be cached).
Thanks for reminding me that they need to die as they reach the end. In later versions they could skip onto a roundabout or another road and keep going.
I'm not too sure how the 'multiple road system' would work regarding the particles - would I have a single particle emitter that populates all roads or one for each road? If it was the former then it would have to have user defined controls to vary the initial starting flow so you could have some busy and some fairly empty. If the latter then how do I make all the different particle groups interact? One to think about
Luckily for the animation all I need are the current workings (fine tuned) with random vehicle assignment, more random speeds, the ability to add a locator as an obstacle and possibly (though not necessary) the ability to leave the motorway at a junction.
mirek - yep, pre 2008 you need to hardware render them (which can be a problem if your gfx card isn't up to scratch like mine). With 2008 you can render through mental ray.
A further option I was going to play with was messing with regenerating generic polygon information from the particle cache data, basically storing the position info and then adding models into it that I know would render normally.
Thats on the backburner at the minute till I get this traffic tool going and have made some tests for the animation
another update (got carried away tonight hence the stupidly late posting - 2am)
It's now got left hand changing in (as suggested by arran) and varied particle speeds. Together they mean that the traffic flow regulates itself and shows some normal motorway driving behaviours
The front particles arent currently tied into doing all the behaviours so look at all the others behind them.
as far as the power of the PC.., just got a new mobo, CPU, power supply.., blah blah.., new video card.., Gforce 8500GT.., havent installed (rebuilt) it all yet.
Think I'm going to add in a locator or the option to control a specific particle and run some tests for one of the scenes in the animation. Then it'll be back to modelling and animating which I've been missing.
Ah, finally I've got back to this after a 2 1/2 month group project that took all my time up.
I'm just getting my head back into the code but am making progress already
This step shows the beginnings of a user interface and allows the user to set a number of vehicle types to be used in the animation. This basically means you can drop your own vehicles etc in, select them and then have them randomly generated on the road.
There are some additional controls (not activated yet) that will allow you to change the road style (left hand drive or right), how many lanes are in use and more.
The vehicle type chooser will have a percent amount or slider so that you can change the amount of certain types of vehicles - e.g, if its a busy road near a port then you would increase the truck vehicle frequency etc...
Are you hanging around in Manchester for the holidays or partying somewhere else?
Hows the studying been going? Figured out any more mad tracking algorithms for drunken people yet??
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