animation of a truck in 3d with hiarchy control/kinimatics.
 

Project Outline
Brief Explanation of Inverse kinematics
Explanation of Global setting based inverse kinematics of the car wheels
Explanation of Interface.
Explanation of User controls.

Project Timeline/ Implementation Strategy:

There where 4 basic parts to this project:
1. Model or locate a Model of a 3d  truck and Import the model into openGl.
This portion of the project turend out to be one of the more complicated portions because of the complecities invovled in importing a 3ds file. Originaly I got a 3ds file reading on my homecomputer but when I treied to read it on the sun machines I ran into some serius errors, and was unable to acomplish the task. Rather then abandon the file I decided to try some other stratigies in getting the model imported into opengl on the sun mahcines. I leard a great deal about the 3ds file format probably more then I would want to know.  Eventualy I worte a seperate program at home to export 3ds files into a text document of array declarations. This tured out to be sucesfull although time consuming because I had to manual look up the colors for each of the objects as well as do some tuning in regards to where each object was placed and what not.

2 User controls.
right arrow -> turn front wheels Right
left arrow -> turn front wheels Left
forward  arrow-> moves the car
back arrow -> does nothing

The interface has just your basic features nesseasary for operation of the vehicles surounding and the vehicle itself. That it.

3. Create some surface with bumps in it.
This "terrain" the vehicle will cover, will start with one simple bump and have it affect whatever wheel it runs into.  Then will expand it into a
random generating terrain of some kind.

4. the physics
This  handle the four wheels independently the back two as one object and the front two as another. Here I used an number of formulats to help get information about the cars position and therefore each wheles position , I then use biilinear interpolation to get the y values for each of the whelse thais was then tested against some threshold and if it supaced the threshold it would move the object in that general direction. Futhermore it will "tilt" the vehicle if the force is on one preticular wheele.

In researching this project I have located a good deal of resource, almost overwhelming amount :). I think I tryed to stick to the more abstract papers
and pseudo code in order to get a better understanding of what I am doing.
Links to more elaborate resources:
http://www.racer.nl/links.htm