Thursday 27 December 2012

Virtual Morgan in Action (2D & 3D)

A couple of years ago a group of Jaguar owners invited the MSCCC to do a country drive with them.  In their first news brief about it they said we would have a chance to drive the North American Jaguar Club Slalom.  See www.jcna.com/library/slalom/index.php for details about the slalom.  Since you go through the set of pylons three times following three slightly different paths; an hour glass, a figure eight, then an oval, I figured I would need some visualization practice beforehand to avoid going off course.  It turned out that they did not include the slalom in the event but by that time I had already build a computer model of it.

I turned to POVray (http://www.povray.org/) to model the course, and then generate pictures at several spots around the course. I learned you can produce animations with POVray by using its clock function.  The clock's 'ticks' can be used to step through a list of coordinates of a path through the course.  Then I needed a car to drive the course, that took a couple of months of measuring something on my '59 +4 and then working out how to model it in POVray.  The result was two Youtube videos.  The car's speed is calculated using acceleration and panic stop figures from the December 1967 Car & Driver road test of a TR4A powered Morgan +4.  The maximum g's in cornering was set to 0.8g by an edjumacated WAG. The resultant course time of under 47 seconds is not a winner but it is respectable.

Here is a track marshal's view from between the start line and the finish.


http://youtu.be/zCyoyRImfXU

 The next one is the one for training to drive the course, a driver eye view in 3D using the Blue/Amber anaglyph coloring.  The driver is looking ahead to where the car will be in 2 seconds.  The gauges on the dash show a green one when accelerating and a red one when braking.




http://youtu.be/34YiFh9jmrs

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