The simple geometry behind any road

Posted by azhenley 2 days ago

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Comments

Comment by jstanley 2 hours ago

You're missing one very important type of curve: a clothoid (or "Euler spiral") is a curve of continuously-varying radius, these are encountered on roads very frequently. And especially on race circuits.

A clothoid is used to connect two lines the same way your fillet is, except instead of just 1 radius it has a radius configured for each end and smoothly changes in between.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_spiral

They are also used in railways, because on a railway you don't have the freedom of moving the car's position across the road, so a transition from a straight track to a constant radius would imply an instantaneous step change in centrifugal force, or infinite jerk. Using a clothoid to smooth the change between the straight track and the constant-radius turn means the lateral acceleration increases smoothly instead of instantaneously.

Comment by trelbutate 1 hour ago

I was also confused about that because they did mention clothoids in their first post: https://sandboxspirit.com/blog/art-of-roads-in-games

Although re-reading that it seems they just don't want to deal with the math involved

Comment by amelius 51 minutes ago

Comment by red_admiral 1 hour ago

And then you have various types of hairpin bend where you actually vary the width of the lanes with the radius: https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8360535,9.6369913,68m

Comment by 21asdffdsa12 18 minutes ago

Expected it to at least mention the slant imposed on any road surface so water does not pool. Disappointed to tears and thus salt-water-aquaplaning in all games build upon this.

Comment by dilberx 1 hour ago

many are yet to catchup