Collider sanity check

Unity Engine
1

Okay, I’m trying to find the impact force when I have a collision. Now a lot of people just use the magnitude of the relative velocity, but that doesn’t work very realistically. Case in point: If you have an object traveling very fast that just barely grazes a stationary object, the relative velocity will be the full velocity of the moving object, and if you apply a force based on that, you’re going to get WAY more force than you should since it was just a slight grazing contact.

(BTW, I noticed there’s an undocumented “impactForceSum” member of “Collision”, but it appears to just be the same thing as relativeVelocity.)

So I came up with this solution and I’m not getting values that “seem” right to me, so I just want a quick sanity check:
Take the normal of the collision (BTW, the collision normals don’t seem properly normalized as I get values of 0.3, 0.1, 0.9 which doesn’t add up to 1), then use that to scale the relativeVelocity.

So for instance, if the collision normal is (1,0,0) and your velocity is (-0.1,0,10) (moving forward and slightly to the left), then the actual impact force vector will be (-0.1,0,0) with a magnitude of 0.1. Compare that with what you get if you just use the magnitude of the relative velocity (which would be around 10).

Anyway, I have a vehicle that, when it is going up a 30-degree slope, it gives me an impact force magnitude rather close to if I ran straight into a vertical wall.

I guess that sort of makes sense, except that I’m tallying damage based upon this, and it wouldn’t make sense for a craft (like a hover craft) to take almost as much damage while climbing a hill as it would running into a brick wall.

Anyway, tell me if I’m missing something. The math seems to work out to me though.

2

Normalized means a magnitude of 1; it doesn’t mean that x + y + z = 1. That only happens when the direction aligns exactly with an axis, and otherwise they’ll add up to more than 1.

–Eric

3

Maybe you could monitor changes in the velocity vector instead. If (currentVelocity - previousVelocity).magnitude exceeds a certain amount, apply damage proportional to its value. That should mean that glancing impacts impart very little damage, whereas anything which slows you down suddenly will do much more. It should also work when someone else hits you while you’re stationary.

Thinking about it, it might be necessary to use a less naïve measuring function than the one above, but perhaps a little smoothing would be sufficient to iron out tiny spikes while still detecting major changes.

4

That’s a great suggestion! I’ll try it out. Thanks! If anyone else has ideas, please let me know, this is a very interesting topic, and I imagine this thread will be valuable to posterity if nothing else.

5

(currentVelocity - previousVelocity) is also a good way to figure what kind of sound to play for a collision.

6

Hi there,
I was just trying to do something like this but I couldn’t figure out a way to get the rigidbody velocity from the previous frame to compare with the current.
If (currentVelocity - previousVelocity).magnitude
How could I get the previousVelocity var here?

7

Something like this:

private var previousVelocity = 0.0;
private var deltaVelocity = 0.0;

function FixedUpdate()
{
	deltaVelocity = (rigidbody.velocity - previousVelocity).magnitude;
	previousVelocity = rigidbody.velocity;
}

Since it doesn’t need to be updated more than once per physics step, you may as well put it in a member variable (deltaVelocity in this case) so you can check it whenever you need to.

8

Cool that worked! But I had to tweak it a little.

private var previousVelocity : Vector3;
private var deltaVelocity = 0.0;

function FixedUpdate()
{
   deltaVelocity = (rigidbody.velocity - previousVelocity).magnitude;
   previousVelocity = rigidbody.velocity;
}
9

Oops! Good point. Probably wasn’t a good idea for me to have two variables named ‘velocity’ with different types. :wink: