Scalability Simulink 3D animation

I'm currently visualizing a light show with about 300 LEDs using the Simulink 3D animation package and it seems I have to handle every LED separately.

In the VR Sink, I have to enable the emissiveColor of each LED seperately and connect each LED to a separate signal in Simulink. If I now want to change the diffusive color of all my LEDs, does that mean I have to change it by hand for each of the 300 LEDs I have?!

Any help is much appreciated.

[Luuk Poort]

I've found a way to change all diffusive colors by opening the vmrl file as text and using 'replace all'. Still this is not a very clean solution and will only work in this particular case.

Answer 1

[Sebastian K]

Hi Luuk,

I am afraid I do not completely understand the issue you are facing. I will try to suggest some ideas to the best of my understanding.

You mention 300 LED objects in virtual world. Are these all identical or do they have separate properties? As far as I understand, you would like these LEDs to share some properties such as color.

If your VR Sink block has a port for the color of each LED, and you want to control the color of multiple LEDs, you could simply connect the ports to a single block (such as a Constant block that specifies a color). It is possible to branch out Simulink signals such that the output of one block is connected to multiple different inputs of other blocks. Then you could simply change the value in that constant block (or even assign it a Workspace parameter) to change the color of multiple LEDs in your model.

If you would not like to deal with a separate VR Sink input port for each LED, maybe you could try to construct your virtual world model so that the LEDs share some parameters. You might be able to do this in the 3D World Editor by using copy-paste by reference. You could copy-paste the "color" node by reference, so that the color of all LEDs in your model would refer to one, which you could then control with a one Simulink signal.

I hope this helps.

Sebastian

[Luuk Poort]

Hi Sebastian,

Thanks for your quick reply.

I need to control the color of each LED separately, so set all of them to be the same color or a different color per LED as I specify. I'm currently doing this by utilizing three major VR Sinks with a hundred inputs each, where I have specified the emissive colors of all LEDs as inputs (see image). This does work but I needed to specify each input by hand, which was a lot of manual work. Splitting everything to have one VR Sink per LED would do no good as I would still have to select the emissive color per LED as input in each of the 300 VR Sinks.

I was wondering whether the manual input selection could be circumvented? Make for example a separate file containing only one LED which is imported 300 times in my main file which can be controlled by 300 equal VR Sinks.

Thanks in advance.

Luuk

[Sebastian K]

Hi again Luuk,

I am afraid I still do not completely understand what you are trying to achieve. You mention that there are 300 LEDs, for which the color needs to be controlled separately. This means that there are 300 independent color parameters to control.

You could try to create a Simulink library block containing a VR Sink for your LED, a connected block that specifies the color as an input. Then you could mask this block and make the color a parameter in the mask. Then you could use this library "LED block" in your Simulink models, add as many as you want, and you would specify the color as a parameter in the block dialog.

Does this sound like something that would be useful?

Sebastian

[Luuk Poort]

Hello Sebastian,

Sorry for the late response.

For as far as I know, the only way to change the "Fields Written" is by manual selection via 'Open' -> 'Simulation' -> 'Block Parameters' -> 'Virtual World Tree'. I would like to be able to select the fields written more easily, by making it an input or inserting a list of all Field names. Say next time I have a thousand LEDs, I do not want to have to check a thousand check boxes in the Virtual World Tree.

I'm new to masks and I do not quite understand how to make such a "LED block".

But, by looking at masks I have found that via right-click VR Sink -> 'Mask' -> 'Mask parameters' a list of all written fields does exist. This means I can generate a large list to assign all desired fields instead of manual selecting.

Thanks a lot for your effort and patience!

All the best, Luuk