Making an object "stick" to a surface along an animation path

Hi Jerry,

Thanks for that. We'll take a look at them.

The cars are from www.marlinstudios.com they look decent and render fast.

Cheers,

JF

you can also see some simple tests made with the SS3 Traffic Animation Tools HERE

Hi Jerry,

How did you change the colours of RPC cars (I'm guessing that's what they are) in that visualisation?

cheers

They will be in MicroStation SELECT series 3 and I would imagine the Civil products will leverage this work in SELECTseries 3 offerings.

Cheers,

JF

Jerry, the Civil Vizualisation tools will be in which SS3 product(s)...?

cheers

Commenting on the movie only:

I know its a test movie, so my comments might not apply to the final solution!

Looks sweet! I also really like the motion blur and the trees and foliage effects!

However, IMHO the brown car changing lanes is skating, and the tiny bump is having too much impact on the vehicles. they appear too stiff. I hope there will be a way to make the driving a bit more forgiving to the geometry :)

I am really looking forward to testing this! And all the other goodies..

Regards,

Here is a test movie ftp://ftp.bentley.com/visualization/Traffic_cams.m2v right click and choose "save target as" to save local copy this is ~ 44MB.

JF

Hi Mike,

We will be adding new Civil Visualization tools for Select Series 3 and the ability to easily animate hundreds of vehicles will be a part of this planned SS3 update. We have this working in house and I will try to post a couple of animation to the community in the coming days.

Regards,

JF

I saw this demoed a few days ago at an MCMC conference. Is this workflow incorporated into SS2 or was that a future tool that was shown? Any help available for making this work if it is available now?

Mike

Jerry,

That would be fantastic (to be able to do this sort of thing).  In civil/transportation this is requested a lot in the past, and even more so now (for a variety of reasons!).  If you need any more specific information or exxamples, please let me know as I will do my best to get what you need.  We have a few new visualization projects that will soon be starting that are going to require a lot of attention to detail  in regards to showing the operation of a very complex multi-modal transit system of cars, buses, trains, and people, so the ability to show the operation as efficiently as possible is going to be a challange!

-tim

Hi Tim,

We should be able to do this and it on our to do list, all four wheels making contact. We know this is a big headache now and we intend to make this much easier soon.

We plan to focus a lot of energy this year on making it easier to visualize civil data sets. Automatically keeping wheels in contact with the road surface is just one of many improvements that we will be working on.

Regards,

JF

Tim,

what about to project curve onto the surface and set it as path for your actor? this is just workaround, I agree the helpers like you mentioned would allow more complex tasks

p.

Anyone have suggestions for forcing an object to stick to a surface.  What I need to do is animate some objects moving over the top of a Microstation surface.  What I was thinking was something along the lines of "magnets", where positively charged magnets (attached to Microstation element/object) would be attracted to a "named negatively charged surface (magnet)".  For example, an RPC object of people would have a magnet attached to it that identifies a "magnetic surface" to attach to.  Another example, and a bit more complex, would be an example of attaching four magnets to four wheels of a car, each magnet would be seeking the same magnetic surface, forcing the cars 3d orientation to change with respect to where it is at on the surface (for example a roadway superelvated section on perhaps a horizontal reverse curve). 

In both of the above scenerios, the 2D path of the objects being defined would use conventional animation tools/worklfows, but then an option would be enabled to "use magnets" to determine Z (or elevation), as well as 3D rotation of the object.

-tim