Rovers kicking up dust

[Galileo]

How difficult would it be to add particles to rover wheels that could simulate the dust being kicked up on a sandy/dusty celestial body? Could it be applied by biome like CollisionFX does it? 

Edited October 31, 2016 by Galileo

[ZooNamedGames]

Well smokescreen adds dust being kicked up for landers... certainly with some work you could have it generate the same by sideways (90 degrees) located behind wheels?

[wasml]

Thought I had seen a mod that did this (0.90 time frame?) - not sure if it was released or not but in the discussion they were working on getting the dust color to match the ground color. I want to say I saw it in the KerbalFoundries thread but don't really remember (and that thread is approaching 200 pages last I looked). Short answer is I believe it is possible.

[Alshain]

On 10/31/2016 at 3:21 PM, Galileo said:

How difficult would it be to add particles to rover wheels that could simulate the dust being kicked up on a sandy/dusty celestial body? Could it be applied by biome like CollisionFX does it? 

CollisionFX almost already does this.  A small tweak to it could certainly make it work.  A little more in-depth tweak could make it customizable.

However, CollisionFX more simulates dust in an atmosphere.  If you watch moon rover footage, the behavior on the Mun would be less like a cloud of smoke and more like a rain of dirt behind it.  The new ParticleSystem in Unity 5 is very powerful, and it could certainly be done either, however CollisionFX is still using the deprecated Unity 4 particle modules and needs to be converted.

 

Edited November 4, 2016 by Alshain

[Galileo]

13 minutes ago, Alshain said:

CollisionFX almost already does this.  A small tweak to it could certainly make it work.  A little more in-depth tweak could make it customizable.

However, CollisionFX more simulates dust in an atmosphere.  If you watch moon rover footage, the behavior on the Mun would be less like a cloud of smoke and more like a rain of dirt behind it.  The new ParticleSystem in Unity 5 is very powerful, and it could certainly be done either, however CollisionFX is still using the deprecated Unity 4 particle modules and needs to be converted.

 

Well while I'm sure it can be done,  I don't have the capability to make such things happen.  I'm taking a course in school right now that is teaching me to program with Unity,  but it's not been very helpful with me trying to create anything within ksp.  

[Alshain]

4 minutes ago, Galileo said:

Well while I'm sure it can be done,  I don't have the capability to make such things happen.  I'm taking a course in school right now that is teaching me to program with Unity,  but it's not been very helpful with me trying to create anything within ksp.  

Well, that's my problem.  I'm good with the coding but not so good with the Unity.

I toyed just a little with the ParticleSystem class attempting to update CollisionFX and ended up with white smoke that always blew 90 degrees to the craft perpetually.

I could probably figure it out eventually but I don't want to sink a whole lot of time into the project if the author is planning to return.  He hasn't been inactive.

Edited November 4, 2016 by Alshain

[Galileo]

Just now, Alshain said:

Well, that's my problem.  I'm good with the coding but not so good with the Unity.

Yeah I understand .  I just don't have the time or patience.  Really I was just hoping to spark the imagination of a programmer that would know how to do it. It's just one of those things that would bring immersion to the game. 

[Galileo]

53 minutes ago, Alshain said:

I could probably figure it out eventually but I don't want to sink a whole lot of time into the project if the author is planning to return.  He hasn't been inactive.

Well i dont remember if dust or dirt was kicked up by wheels.  I know it happened during crashes and collisions but I don't think it happened with wheels.  Maybe I stead of making a new mod,  it could just be an added feature to collision fx? If it's ever updated

Edited November 4, 2016 by Galileo

[Alshain]

40 minutes ago, Galileo said:

Well i dont remember if dust or dirt was kicked up by wheels.  I know it happened during crashes and collisions but I don't think it happened with wheels.  Maybe I stead of making a new mod,  it could just be an added feature to collision fx? If it's ever updated

That's a simple change I believe.  There is a check that determines if it is a wheel collider and opts not to show the dust effect for them.  That's the easy change I was talking about, I could disable that check and just have it always play.  A more involved configurable design would have you able to define a biome as having loose surfacing.  So driving across grass wouldn't really kick up anything (unless you crashed) but driving across snow, or shores, or dirt runway would.  That could also be applied to the Mun, but alas that would be slightly less realistic there unless we could design a new particle for vacuum behavior.

The first step for that however would be to get it converted to the ParticleSystem.

Edited November 4, 2016 by Alshain

[Sharpy]

It can even be done plugin-less, though not elegantly - the intensity of the dust would be bound to throttle and not wheel accelerator, and it would keep kicking dust up even when off the ground. Essentially, add the module of rocket engine to a wheel, aimed in the direction the dust should fly, and create a particle emitter to simulate the "ballistic trajectory" in Unity (pretty easy actually). So if you need this for cinematics/machinima, that would be perfectly sufficient.

 

Edited November 7, 2016 by Sharpy