Vissim to LumenRT - Cars follow road elevation

I have a colleague create a Vissim model that I'm able to import into LumenRT, but the cars are all set to a single elevation.  Is there a way to have it follow the topography?  They're either going through the road or floating above it.

  • Hello David,

    We follow Z axis data defined in Vissim . While creating Vissim data  topology of actual road geometry should have to consider so  Z axis values will get defined and respective to geometry and cars will move along geometry

    We have Enhancement created for re projecting car data to Geometry.

    Enhancement 1073969:Add ability to project Vissim data cars on nearest or user defined surface
    Thanks & Rg
    Harshad



  • Harshad,  This Z axis issue has eluded me for some time.  With this post are you saying that this issue has been resolved and incorporated into a version of LumenRT which is currently available for download, or are you saying that it will be incorporated in the future?  I can think of nothing more or an impediment from using LumenRT on a much more frequent basis.  The engineers are extremely interested in seeing their VISSIM traffic models in LumenRT, and less interested in the current path animation tools (which are impressive) currently available in LumenRT.  I look forward to hearing from you.  Thank you. 

  • Hi Thomas, if you have 3DS Max there is a script you can use to achieve this.

    Provided you have a mesh representing your road surfacing, the script will import the vehicle data per time frame and create a scene based on proxies and closest surface elevation based on horizontal data.

    This will allow you to create a "baked" model for your animation. Though I admit, unless you have an excellent library of max models, lumenRT's HQ models are much better. So, alternatively if you know a little bit of maxscript you can tweak the script to output the *.ani.txt with correct elevation values. This will bypass needing to import "baked models completely.

    If 3DS Max is not an option  you could probably achieve the same results using Unity. From here LumenRT's "VISSIM2LumenRT.py" script will handle the rest, or you can tweak it to your fit (make sure you backup though).

    Also, its been a while since I've done this so I'm not sure how much has changed in the new release. Last I checked pedestrians aren't importable, if you force this by editing the above *.py to use LumenRT's characters they remain stationary. You could create your own "baked animation" pedestrians to simulate walking behavior and use the potion data in the *.ani.txt to translate positions.

    Hope that this helps

    Damian