Hi, I started my experiences with Babylon to build railway models.
I have been a maintenance manager on railway electrical systems and therefore
I used the specific knowledge to simulate traction lines, primary lines, plants
safety equipment, traction vehicles and tracking of tracks, bridges and tunnels.
I initially used an elementary system to move the stationmaster, and I realized
that it was necessary to deepen the knowledge of the structure of skeletons and animations.
I am an old technician, born at the dawn of the information technology explosion, I graduated as an expertelectrician using as a calculator a logarithmic ruler of wood with a precision of suntwo significant digits. That type of tool has been used around the world to design almost everything.
Two significant figures seem few but I think the evaluation of a 1/100 deviation is
enough to properly design 99% of human activities.
3d graphics have evolved to build quality images with millions of vertices and triangles
but the inhabitants of my railway scenarios are small … it is not necessary to see them closely,
I searched in vain for simple figure editors.
Blender is an exceptional program, oriented to complex scalar images, but in my humble way
opinion not suitable for doing … little things.
I got an important lesson from an old farmer, I bought a tedder cart
for my ride-on mower, it could be used both as a tedder and a rake.
When I asked him for his opinion, he replied that two machines were built to do one thing each
they perform better functions than a single machine doing both.
It was an important lesson, a simple consideration with huge implications …
Blender has a multitude of advanced functions and its operational structure uses compatible algorithms
with that philosophy. But I have to do simple things … as I have already mentioned to drive a nail
I need a hammer, not a crawler bucket …
I had to learn how to use Blender roughly to build a simple skeleton
simple. I disassembled the .babylon file and tried to figure out what it was up to …
Reverse procedure … we start from the end to try to understand the succession of algorithms.
In my previous posts I tried to explain the stages of my journey and the wriggling fish
is the result … the generic animation frame is a 4x4 rototranslation matrix …
To get to that goal I proceeded to start with a simple text editor, ma
proceeding I built the algorithms (tools) to proceed in a less … alien way.
Little by little a 3d editor of skeletons and animations has been outlined, oriented to the single vertices,
to the single triangles, to the relationship between 3d vertices and uvs 2d vertices of the texture …
The work is not finished and it will not end as evolution does not end … it was a nice way to
play and keep my mind and imagination trained.
I worked a lot in double-digit compaction of all floating point data to get
readable JSON files with stacked data … stupid and boring programming but useful for
“read” … what is combined …
I came to develop those 4x4 matrices to obtain the possibility of simultaneous rotation on
three axes … in a single frame … I’m working on it …
As soon as possible I will present my … little game.
Greetings to all. 
Love it!
Can’t wait to see it!
A program under construction is like a construction site … Who builds the scaffolding who mounts the scaffolding?
Fortunately, visiting a program under construction you can not get hurt … eheheee.
Errors, forgetfulness, obsolete functions, outdated data, inconsistent data, an unpredictable multitude of traps and malfunctions. Not surprisingly, the debugging effort is more demanding than writing the program itself.
I was skeptical to offer you such an environment … but in the end I was convinced by the thesis that to feed the brainstorming errors are allowed.
For the moment only the function to animate the figures in mode works
“scene.registerBeforeRender ()”. The data is saved in the browser’s local storage.
The animations are obtained mainly using the sin (angle) function but others are operational
experimental possibilities … Trap, Pulse, Rebound … implemented with 4 parameters: Size Speed ​​Phase Offset.
I built 4 stickers but only Speedy and Fish are animated, …
you can play with it and evaluate the graphics and effects …
Warning … browsers often prefer to fetch data from previous versions in cache.
To work around you can open the link in unknown mode.
Hi, I’ll tell you again about my story with Babylon, at 74 I continue to build and use toys.
Babylon was for me an immense, curious, unpredictable, fascinating playground. In the 80s I had a Spectrum with a z80 processor and no computer knowledge. The attempt to simulate the game of tennis by bouncing the ball left and right on the rackets quickly failed. The Basic language did not allow us to exploit that little bit of resources of the Z80 processor. I moved on to assembler…sleepless nights…after about a year I had built a rudimentary 3D engine that allowed me to hunt down enemy biplanes while flying over a stylized landscape. I remember with emotion when the attack routine oriented the enemies towards me… lots of trigonometry… ehehh. This… alien… experience in the frantic search for saving code, resources and time, I think has left its mark on me…
The original claim to understand its basic functioning, over time, had to be given up… The systems for me became complex beyond all possible limits… Then work, family, children distracted me. I went through a period of forced physical inactivity due to a hip prosthesis, everything is fine, I started my models again… sooner or later or maybe never I will have to animate my model railways.
At a later time I will tackle the in-depth analysis of the lower limits of detail of meshes and skeletons, of texture skinning strategies… For the moment my girls move without collision controls… it would be too heavy processing. …eheeehh, they move at different speeds around the towers. The different speeds force them to follow different curvature radii so that overtaking takes place without too many collisions and mergers… and this… in the general confusion… is almost not noticeable.
Here is the link:
Moving People
The source code link:
SinglePath
Greetings
P.S. I fixed the Speedy link from the previous post. Now you enter the template library of my experimental editor.
Glad you’re fine!
__
Do you know about YUKA? You might be interested in Steering behaviors.
Hi Roland, the vector between two points A and B represents the direction that A must travel to reach B… and vice versa. In 2D space each of the girls in the example points in the direction of the current tower and if it gets “too close” it progressively turns towards the direction of the next tower. In an engagement routine, in addition to the turning process, an attack/escape strategy must be foreseen.
If the enemy has not yet reached the direction of fire, you can attack, otherwise a diversionary maneuver would be better… Naturally, the respective parameters of speed, maneuverability, courage, risk and distance from other obstacles come into play…
I thought you’re into human crowd simulation and now it turned out this is something like a proof of concept for tower defense game? 
If the girls shot at the towers they would definitely hit them…eheee. An attack on the towers…I deliberately oversteered the girls to avoid their trajectories coinciding with mutual collision. The scene seen from the towers would be scary… maybe in 3D space…The towers…could, in turn, move simulating the battle between squadrons…ideas…ideas…you could be on board a tower and sell your life dearly…ehehhh…