CompuServe Messages

Perhaps some of you can help me out with a rather interesting problem… (Seem to remember something like this out of my 2nd year Physics book…) I'm intrigued with the idea of creating an animation which emulates the pitch, yaw, and roll of an airplane in flight. (Classic animation, right?) It occurs to me that manipulating the CAMERA description in a POV scene file (some combination of changes to the LOCATION, SKY (or ROTATE), and LOOK_AT vectors) over time should do it. I've already created the basic scene elements for POV which will remain more or less static as the CAMERA moves, and I've downloaded Phillip Sherrod's RTAG animation control interpreter. Now… I ain't no NASA Engineer… BUT… It would seem to me that there are a few things to consider: 1) LOCATION — I was thinking of describing the "flight path" in the three components X, Y, and Z using Phillip's SPLINE function. 2) PITCH/YAW — Maybe I can simply use points along the same SPLINE curve to look ahead some (i.e. point LOOK_AT at SPLINE(X,Y,Z) at curframe + 1). This is sort of like what you do when riding a roller coaster. Always looking ahead down the track a ways. 3) ROLL — (This is the really tough one.) Should I use the SKY vector or the ROTATE command to modify the CAMERA description for roll? ROTATE may work if the pitch and yaw are properly tangent to the SPLINE curve, but I've seen unpredictable results with this in some (casual) experimentation. Perhaps using a unit SKY vector with components in the direction of any acceleration (e.g. towards the center of a turn) might be better. Either way, it sounds like the amount of roll at any time, T, should be proportionate to the 2nd derivative of the function describing the flight path at the same time T. (Digging way back for that one…) Has anyone out there tried anything similar to this using POV and/or RTAG? Any pointers, ideas, reference materials? Thanks much, – Mark There are 2 Replies. Read action !