Some questions about terrain friction, wind and sand

[kai$er]

Hello everybody,

I'm developing a sandy/desert terrain model with Irrlicht&Newton dynamics for my college thesis.

I have two important questions. This terrain should be explorated by a vehicle/rover with wheels and must have real environmental parameters, so:

- how can I set friction on my terrain? Most of all, I need to set different kind of friction for different kind of sand. For example, in the same map I'll have a region A with a friction coefficient X, and a regione B with a friction coefficient Y;

- how can I simulate wind and its effects? Not only in terms of graphic effects, but most of all as pressure/force effects which can disturb my vehicle.

Thank you for your attention, every advice is useful!

[JP]

A lot of this should really be asked on the Newton forum as it's not to do with Irrlicht so you'll get more help there.

I would have thought that the friction stuff would be handled by Newton, you should be able to set different materials for a surface so you can make your terrain have a certain friction and another part of your world/terrain another friction.

The wind, again there should be something in Newton that allows you to apply user defined forces to objects...

Graphically i guess you'd just have some sand blowing across the screen... not sure how would be best to do that, i suppose you could get a cool effect with a particle emitter and maybe animating the texture applied to each particle... though to get it looking really nice might require too many particles for it to give good performance...