HELP NEEDED!!! Creating an animation using Matlab

[DM]Frink

Hey guys, I am doing a thesis in DCU for a masters and I have to create an animation using Matlab. I have to animate a bus going along a road profile and if variables are changed, such as the the stiffness, the centre of gravity, etc, the bus has to react appropriately to these changes. From this I also have to have the user use the program to determine the best place to sit on the bus. My question is, is it possible to animate something like this using Matlab? I have a road profile that has to be inputted into the m file but at the moment I am completely lost as to where to start with creating the bus? Can anyone help me?

Any help would be appreciated at this stage, so if anyone can please do!

Thank you in advance!!!

maceocc2

Hi,

I did something very similar in DCU some years ago under Prof. McCorkell. I'm not exactly sure if using mathLab to create the graphic scen would be the best approach. However this would be up to yourself and you level of knowledge of MathLab.

What I did however was to create a MathLab application that generated the data. i.e speed, angle etc, and feed that data into a Java 3D application, I did that because it was easier to create a 3D Java scene.

wobbles-grogan

Did a quick google search, it seems like Simulink 3D Animation is what you need to use to animate in matlab,

http://www.mathworks.com/products/3d-animation/demos.html

See what you think, hopefully itll help.

Otherwise, go with outputting the calcualtions to a file and draw the 3D model usign OpenGL or whatever.

[DM]Frink

Cheers guys for the suggestions. I have already spent ages researching animation using mathlab and I only have about a month left to complete it so I basically just wanted to use mathlab for everything. Like to write the code for the data and then for the animation, but I am not sure how to do that at all really, so I was wondering does any know how to?

wobbles-grogan

You obviously didnt read the link i gave you!

Its a plugin thing for matlab from what i understand of it.

Im not sure whether matlab has native 3D plotting support....

Edit:

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/WWW/faculty/bequette/lou/simtut/simtut_html.html

A tutorial on using simulink! I read the first couple pages, it looks good. Hope you get it finished!!

[DM]Frink

sorry never heard of OpenGL so was not sure what it was

[DM]Frink

Thanks wobbles-grogan just going over that stuff now, its seems really helpful, cheers!!

Also if anyone else has anymore on coding for animations, I would love to hear from you, thanks again everyone for your help!