Ski Physics

Hello everyone.

Does anyone have experience on creating skiing physics?
I'm currently working on a training scenario for a ski-chair, but having problem on creating a believable skiing experience.
The purpose this game is to help player to get use to the ski-chair control and have a good idea how should they handle different terrain when they are on the actual ski-chair.
And since it is a ski-chair, it drives more like a vehicle, the only control available to the player would be adjusting the ski angles.
i.e. no jump-turn, no leaning steer, etc.

For that reason, the game doesn't need to 100% physically accurate, but still need to be able to present most of the basic physics attributes of a ski chair.

My first attempt was to use a car prefab to fake the skiing physics by taking out the engine, adding braking force when the ski is in "/ \"(pizza) shape, lower braking force when the ski is in "| |"(french fries) shape etc.
The result was not great, but acceptable back then.

And as the project moved on, we migrated from Unity 4 to Unity 5, which drastically changed the physics properties, and the old settings are no longer usable.

So I took that chance to try to create my own skiing controller script.
But since I only skied for a couple of times in my life and most of my physics knowledge were gone with the years, I was struggling on this task.

So this is what I did:
Setup the physical material of the ski so it has really low dynamic friction, so the ski-chair will now slide down the slope due to gravity.

And then I separate the gravity force into different forward and side-way components, so I can apply higher drag on side-way component to make the ski-chair doesn't slide side-way too much.

That's the basic part for the ski-movement, pretty straight forward, but what's been bothering me a lot is the steering part.

There are so many different factor that affect the steering, here are the ones that I came up with (probably not correct):

• The ski angles (they have different turning radius depends on the current ski condition, i.e. pizza, french fries)
• Current velocity of the ski-chair, i.e. ski-chair in stationary shouldn't be able to turn, higher speed should result in lower steering efficiency
• Local Slope
• Fall-line Slope
• Fall-line Direction, i.e. when the ski-chair is running down hill without active steering, the ski-chair should steer itself towards the direction of the Fall-line

I calculate the steering force base on above factors and a bunch of magic numbers and then apply them by AddRelativeTorque().

This is where I'm currently at:

The result is acceptable, but the steering still feels a little bit off.
I'm wondering if I missed any important factors, or is there a better way to implement a skiing physics.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

I think it looks fantastic, how did this project come out in the end?

 

Hi and sorry for getting this thread out of the past but im trying to do a little ski game but i have very little experience in all this
I already manage to make my player go forward when i press up and to add drag while i press down
and also to rotate according to his local Y axis in order to turn BUT here comes my problem i have been searching for a few days but i can't find a way to restrict the players movement to his local Z axis so that when i rotate him using the left and right arrows he will then go in the right direction
this would also limit his sliding down the slope to his local axis Z !

i found the freeze position but it is regarding the world space and not the self space

thanks in advance and I find this game amazing for the time it was published !!