3D Model of the Month – Spirit of St. Louis collab. with Smithsonian Institution
Introduction
On May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic and changed history: this marked the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from Long Island, New York, to Paris. This trip turned the aircraft into a global icon. We’re proud to have supported the Smithsonian Institution in preserving this historic aircraft via 3D innovation!
What is the Blender Add-on and Why You’re Going to Love It
An essential tool for this project was our Blender add-on that offers CAD tessellation, optimization, and texture baking.
Why is this a big deal?
No need to switch between different programs and save a lot of time
Process the whole mesh or choose specific parts to hand-tailor the results
Get immediate visual feedback in Blender within your own scenes
Main Features
1. Mesh and Size Reduction
The original file size of the model is too big for real-time applications.
During optimization the model was decimated from 702k down to 148k faces, with no visual loss in quality.
To reduce the file size, RapidPipeline offers various solutions for reducing a model’s face count. In this example we used Decimation and a Face target.
2. Atlas Baking
Automatically, multiple textures were combined into single atlases using the Atlas Baking workflow. This helped reduce draw calls and improve memory usage.
3. Bake Normals
New normal maps were baked from the original airplane to help preserve all the surface details from the original into the simpler decimated version.
A key feature of the RapidPipeline system is all the settings are fully configurable and easy to integrate into your own workflows.
The result
The original mesh was reduced by 82%. Furthermore, we went from the initial 414 MB to merely 8 MB, leaving us with a very lightweight model.
Thanks to Smithsonian’s 3D scanning and to RapidPipeline’s 3D optimization algorithms,
Charles Lindbergh’s legendary airplane is now available as a beautiful web-ready digital 3D model, fully accessible to educators, researchers, and the public, worldwide!
Take a closer look at our final model in the interactive viewer below and try the RapidPipeline Blender Add-on for free!
Meet the Author
Hue
Technical 3D Artist
Hue is a 3D Artist / QA Artist / UI+UX Designer at DGG. Working with leading retailers, DGG is on a mission to automate 3D asset optimization workflows for Web, mobile and XR targets - for e-commerce, and beyond. Hue has previously worked for firms that specialize in VR/Real-time projects and her field of expertise is 3D Environment Art and Unreal Engine.
