This is an animated version of the still I posted on p.b.i

Basically I've come up with a fairly simplistic way of lighting up the boosters
on this rocket ship according to the acceleration and angular acceleration it's
experiencing. The physics is a bit unrealistic, because it's inverse kinematics
it's quite possible for the ship to move in a direction where it has no boosters
to propel it. Also at present it pays no attention to the size and number of
boosters.

In this test I have a simple spline that I use to set the rotation of the ship
object, then I run a few calculations to approximate the angular acceleration. I
dot product this with the angular thrust vector for each booster (just the cross
product of the booster direction and position relative to the centre of mass).
I'm probably getting way too technical here :) but anyway the result is a value
telling me how much to light up the booster.

The next stage will be to insert this into a full scene, then eventually I'll
have an irtc entry!

Comments, criticisms, and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

--
Tek
http://www.evilsuperbrain.com

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Download 'boostertest.m1v.mpg' (246 KB)