We thought we would put up a quick post on ‘what we are currently doing’… At the moment we are looking into simulating and visualising flow in the city, linked into our earlier 3D based agent work. Its early days but using a particle system linked to known wind dynamics and a 3D city model you can create a rapid visualisation of the dispersion of particles. This maybe useful if, for example, a ‘dirty bomb’ was exploded or if some sort of contamination was detected.
Taking this further it can also be used for crowd modelling and pedestrian evacuation analysis within the cityscape. We are using our ‘fantasy city’ as a first test bed, rather than our London model at the moment as its easier to work with in the first stage of development…
You can see how we created the model via our Fantasy City Tutorial for 3D Studio Max.
i suggest trying windstation software, they got a free trial and after that its cheap to buy. maybe its not as attractive visually but it shows the flows over a 3d surface incorporating turbulance equations and it provides results in 3d (xyz coordinates + flow parameters). i tested that with a detailed surface of urban environment and… well, it looks cool;) i would love to see your advances with that:) it’s inspiring to see you making up great (sometimes crazy) attempts to simulate reality.
Thanks for the tip – I’ll take a look at Windstation.
I thought particles maybe worth a go (its a Friday thing), the results are up as a movie now in the latest post.
🙂
Andy