Ray Cast Vehicle reference

[John McCutchan]

Hey, I'm starting to look at adding vehicle support to my engine. It seems like a good approach is the so called "ray cast vehicle". I've seen erin catto's blog post on the subject, but I can't seem to find any paper discussing the subject. Can someone point me to some literature ?

Thanks

[Erwin Coumans]

The raycast vehicle model concept is extremely simple: just take a single rigidbody for the chassis. Instead of having 4 wheels, you can apply suspension and friction impulses in the 4 wheel connection points. The main benefits from using rays instead of real wheels are better collision handling with curbs, and better control over friction model at high speeds (typical rigidbody simulations get into stability problems simulating rigidbody wheels at very high angular velocity).

Bullet 2.50 physics engine has a very basic raycast vehicle implementation with suspension and tyre friction (see VehicleDemo).

For papers/resources/books on game vehicle dynamics check out the 'links' section of racer.nl.

Hope this helps,
Erwin