DavidKahlVFX

Art-direct the Railsystem

Added 2018-10-25 07:29:16 +0000 UTC

Hellow fellow Houdini comrades,

I can't tell you all how thankful I am that there are indeed people who whill see this post at this early stage of my patreon. But I can't thank you all day we have descision to make! ;-)

I am progressing nicely with my RnD project but there are some issues I am currently facing. And it's not a "how to solve it" problem - more a "what the hell do I do with this" situation.

But first let me give you a status update where it is going at the moment. I already have a system that allows me to take any terrain, draw a curve very loosely on it and I get a rail on a specific height. That rail then follows the curve over the terrain no matter what's in the way. Am I over a cliff - I switch to a different mode. Is there a mountain in the way - create a tunnel for the rail to go through it.

Since chapter one will cover the general concept I want to mainly create the fundamental data you would need to create more complex structures. Many of it is already in place but I have to answer a mainly artistic question.

A question where I can use your help. As you can see in the next image we have different kinds of bridge requiries. Here I tested each possible holder position to see where the ground would be to far away.

That showed that I need to find a way to connect between hold points, bridge points, tunnel points and all variants in between.

The question is - how to solve this situation? The Rail is high above the terrain but also makes a curve. An interesting problem. After some research I found that this could be solve by only a few general approaches.

The options

- a sci fi approach with some kind of floating plattform mechanism

- a Tower with hanging cables like in the image below

- big massive towers that can reach the ground no matter how big the distance is

- fuck physics (some kind of light but nice looking solution that would never hold in reality, and yeah that means floating sci fi is reality goddammit)