Aligning to a Vertical Drop & Climb

I am trying to get my ship to race around a track at the moment (as some of you may already know). I am now faced with a new problem. I need it to fall off a near vertical drop and then climb up the other side. See mock up picture below to give you an idea of what I mean:




But as I go over the edge of the drop it doesn't appear to see it and keeps going. I am assuming that my linepick command is missing the drop and therefore failing to alight the ship to it.

Can someone suggest the best way of overcoming this problem. Would I need to use more than one linepick (say a little infront of the ship and angled to look back under it?). Also how would I realign the camera in these cases to keep it behind the ship when it is going almost sriaight down.

I only want ideas on how to accomplish this and not the acutal solution.

Thanks

Max

I think as it stands at the moment your linepick simply does a pick down along the world Y axis? It may belp to have it pick down relative to ship orientation. Tformvector 0,-100,0, ship, 0. Linepick sx,sy,sz,tformedx(),tformedy(),tformedz() sort of thing. Of course this will still be thwarted if the track changes slope too quickly for the ship speed, and in this respect it will also depend on how fast you align the ship to the track with aligntovector. So your idea of doing more than one pick may be necessary. There could be other approaches though. As for the camera you perhaps could do a chase cam, I thought Ross had already done this though.

He had done one, but as the camera stands it doesn't work on the track above (which I have imported into Blitz in 3DS format). That is why I asked about the camera. Due to speeds that I want (i.e I want the ship moving like hell at times) I thought extra linepicks maybe the answer, as it *sometimes* goes over the edge when going slowly - but the camera orientation is always wrong so far).

Max

You could put pivots on the part where it slopes vertically. Each pivot holding an X angle the ship should be rotated to perhaps?

Hmmm, the main problem i see is you ship travelling that fast that you physicaly miss the drop.

Say the drop occurs at z = 1000. Your ship is moving at 15 units per frame for example. your ship could be 5 unit's away from the drop, then next frame be 10 units ahead of the drop. I don't really see it being feasable, because of the speed your ship will be travelling... How fast is it travelling btw?

I have altered the scale of everything due to the high unit amounts it was shifting in each frame. To get a good lick of speed before I needed a speed of 160+ units. Now with a speed of 30 units it is on the verge of being a little too fast for some of the corners in the track that I am now using.

Part of the reason for the rescale was that this scale problem was mentioned before for other reasons. I appreicate that the higher the speed the harder it is technically to do things like this because of the distances involved.

I think I have got my aforementioned camera problem sorted out. It at least aligns properly to the banked curves about 95% of the time.

I am wondering if scaling everything down a little more would perhaps help. At the moment the ship is now the same size as a cube created directly in Blitz3D, as I used the .X exported to save one out and used it as a size template. Where as before the ship would have been around 20-30 times that size!

Max