Cars parking

[pixelstudio]

Hey people,

A off topic question,
I got a question if i could make an simulation of a couple of cars that are going into a parking garage and park their car.

Well i thought, okey easy enough.

now after getting some details, it gets kinda complicated.
- There are around 2000 cars that need to be included in the simulation
- first car parks at parkingspot01, second on parkingspot02, etc
- when entering the garage there is a 10 - 20 secs pause (cuase of the barrier)
- cars may not collide wich each other...

Soooo i started thinking how to do this, and i have not found a sollution yet. so perhaps any1 has an idea.
Maybe particles will be help me out...?

cheers

[ene.xis]

have u check this out?
http://rendering.ru/index.php/plugins/xcv/

[cgrant3d]

Not sure if this is within your budget but I saw this recently and thought it looked interesting

http://www.rendering.ru/index.php/plugins/xcv/

Alternatively, if you need to find a cheaper / free solution... Hmm. Maybe a combination of pflow for some of the "dumber" cars that just need to drive ... Maybe the free MadCar plugin for some of the cars you want to give a nicer touch to...

http://www.karba.eol3d.com/Plugins/MadCar/

I'm sure you could do it with scripting / pflow entirely but IMHO setting up the whole thing that way would be a waste of time. You might even reconsider whether you truly need 2000 cars to park. I mean - just because the garage will hold 2000 cars doesn't mean anyone wants to watch them park - I'd rather watch paint dry or a VRay render with DOF / MoBlur / QMC GI on a Pentium 1Ghz. ... Maybe you could park a few cars, then fade to a scene where the whole floor has parked or something like that?

[dellis]

What about using crowd?

[pixelstudio]

I'm sure you could do it with scripting / pflow entirely but IMHO setting up the whole thing that way would be a waste of time. You might even reconsider whether you truly need 2000 cars to park. I mean - just because the garage will hold 2000 cars doesn't mean anyone wants to watch them park - I'd rather watch paint dry or a VRay render with DOF / MoBlur / QMC GI on a Pentium 1Ghz. ... Maybe you could park a few cars, then fade to a scene where the whole floor has parked or something like that?

Well i would wish this also, but the question is what happens when that much cars enter the building, is there any space for people to walk, etc.
Thus a whole animation is required.

I have managed to get it a bit "easieer". the movement of the cars can be realy simple (no nice animation required there) yeuh.
so madcar is nice. but i'n not ganna use it.
CityTraffic look really cool. but i wonder if this can be done with particles.
Anyway, many thanks for the idea so far!

what about thinking particles? would that help me out? i'm guessing my biggest problems is the collision of the cars (and thus cars waiting for each other... ?)
And how they find their parking spot (create 2000 splines to guide them, or otherwise.... ??? )


more ideas are always welcome tho haha

[instinct]

Sure can be done with Particles. But given the standard toolset setting up the rules needed will be at least "tricky"

Regards,
Thorsten

[pixelstudio]

CityTraffic looks very nice, but the demo is a bit weird, and crashes some times.
Also there is not help anywhere... ?

Thus particles is my next thing to look at

hmm check out crowd, look nice also, but how do i stop the car then it has reached as parking spot. and how do i guide car01 > carspot01, etc ?

[RErender]

Probably the easiest way to set it up would be to move the cars along splines with a path constraint. Set up one to stop at the gate and park then just copy the set, modify the spline to go to the next space and slide the percent keys to adjust timing.

[pixelstudio]

for 2000 cars, it's a bit much....

[RErender]

Unless you can get some AI solution working, any way you slice it you are going to be busy for the foreseeable future

[kimgar]

i was thinking the same as you rerender, but what if you added some script to duplicate and offset both pos and timing to the path. not sure how max will perform with 2000 path constrains though