A2A Accu-sim J-3 Cub P3Dv4 Update July 2019

A2A Accu-sim J-3 Cub P3Dv4 Update July 2019

The A2A Simulations Accu-sim J-3 Cub for P3Dv4+ just hit Beta testing. So today is a good day to throw a little update for the Cub and give one of our Team members a platform to show some of the work that goes into sometimes the most overlooked items.

First up we have some cracking Work In Progress images of the cub from our very own Nick;

Next up we want to pass the update over to Michal Puto one of our extremely talented Artists to talk about an area often overlooked;

Character design

When we started the Cub remaster for P3D we knew we would need new pilot and new passenger models. With PBR, new textures and material definitions it was obvious that we would have to use the same workflow that’s used in modern mainstream games.

I’ve decided to use several programs for characters – Marvelous Designer for clothes, ZBrush for additional sculpting and detailing, Substance Painter for textures and 3ds max for lowpoly, in game mesh.

Here’s an example of how I approached the character development.

This is a screengrab from Marvelous Designer. It’s a virtual fashion program, it follows real-life outfit design. I had to draw 2d cloth pattern, sew it together, and then simulate it on the virtual avatar. The program simulates gravity and fabric characteristics (some other things like wind or animation too, but it was not needed for our case) The 3d clothes made in Marvelous Designer are draped in a realistic way, it’s also possible to create zips and buttons. The model prepared in the program was then exported to ZBrush for additional detailing.

ZBrush is a virtual sculpting software, it’s similar to working in real world clay using graphics tablet. I’ve sculpted some additional fabric folds, added 3d zip, seams and 3d stitches.

This is the highpoly model made with several millions of polygons, it will be used as a reference for the ingame, realtime model and as a source for baked textures like tangent and object space normalmaps, curvature, ambient occlusion and material ID.

This is the moment when I create a lowpoly model that matches the highpoly one, I create uv map and export the mesh to Substance Painter for texturing. Substance Painter is an amazing program that’s used to create full texture sets – including albedo (color), metallic, glossiness and normalmaps. It is possible to create the textures both procedurally and by painting them by hand on both 3d model directly or traditionally on 2d texture layout.

Almost final, textured lowpoly mesh rendered in Marmoset Toolbag. This is a PBR model, ready to import to any PBR enabled platform.

Heidi will return as a passenger, and we will have both male and female pilots to choose, like we have in our GA line.

This is the preview of the highpoly characters for our Piper Cub, rendered in Zbrush using neutral material.