Apply vertical offset to collision simulation

Question

I'm trying to simulate a car driving on sand. The problem I am having is that the car sits perfectly on the ground which doesn't look very realistic when in real life the car tires would intersect the softer ground surface. I guess the current workflow assumes you are driving on hard ground?

It would be great if there where an offset attribute in the ground collision tag that would allow me to sink the car into the ground slightly. Would it be possible to add this in the next update?

My work around is to hide the collision floor mesh and then copy the same mesh with an offset so that it does intersect the tires. This mesh can be used in combination with a collision modifier to create an approximation of a car driving on a sandy or snowy surface. One issue with this workaround is that more complex terrains can be more difficult to achieve a uniform offset. It would be much easier to offset the collision calculations in this case.

Answer 1

Thank you for your feedback. I will put it to the feature request list.

But I think, your workaround is more flexible than a uniform offset, because the visual copy of the terrain doesn't need to be an exact copy. So you can simulate surface conditions that let the car sink differently deep.

Btw.: Did you know, that you can use sweepNurbs as tracks that can be subtracted from the surface using the Boole object?