News
3DI Gains Industry Recognition
At 3DI we’ve always felt we were on the cutting edge of the simulation technology market. This past Friday that feeling was confirmed as we were awarded Best Game (Commercial/Casual/Serious) at the 2010 MediaFRESH awards in Calgary for our Caterpillar 924H Small Wheel Loader simulator. The 924H simulator is deployed in a training facility at Fort Leonard Wood for the US Army Engineering Corps. Commercial success is fantastic, but peer acknowledgment is always an honour. The entire team at 3DI is extremely proud of our work. Being recognized by the tech community for that work is icing on a cake built with passion, creativity, intelligence and hard work. Thank you to Digital Albert and all who voted. We are on track to outdo our past efforts with products we have in the pipe. Stay tuned for further exciting announcements by 3DI as 2010 will be our most exciting year to date.
Game Developer Magazine Profiles 3DI's Success Story
Epic Games, the makers of the Unreal Engine, have chosen to profile 3DI in their latest success stories series. The profile is featured in the January 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine. The article discusses our past projects and looks to our future work using the cutting edge features that Unreal Engine 3 provides. Technical Director Andrew Czarnietzki looks at how using Unreal Engine 3 makes 3DI innovative, agile and creative all within budget and on tight timelines. You can view the article here.
Phase 1 of Snubco's S9 Rig Assist Snubbing Simulator Launches
3DI is also pleased to announce that they have completed the first phase of a project with a world leader in the field of snubbing. The world’s first snubbing simulation is being developed at 3DI in conjunction with Snubco Group. 3DI has developed a simulation that accurately models the entire hydraulic systems and intense pressures involved in dealing with a live natural gas well and the equipment used to move pipe in and out of those wells.
Snubbing Simulator Photos:
- Sean McKinnon, Chief Engineer, Snubco Group Inc.
3DI is fervent in its belief that valuable brands should be honored faithfully in any reproduction process. Our client’s quality standards and reproduction policies that are compulsory for engineering drawings, photography and videography are adopted as the foundation for 3DI’s creation of virtual digital properties.
If a picture tells a thousand words, then the story told through an interactive simulation is an epic tale. 3d assets can have long-term value for marketing, branding and training and are particularly important for competing for today’s consumers and employees. Creating top quality 3d assets requires a diverse mix of creative talents, professional skills, superb technology and an uncommon attention to detail.
Comprised of an eclectic mix of engineers, industrial designers, programmers, 3d graphic artists, and AI and gaming specialists, 3DI’s technical team understands the importance of physics-based realism and superb lighting treatments required to design and develop top quality interactive simulations for training or design visualization purposes.
For example, when 3DI found existing lighting solutions inadequate, our technical team created a unique and proprietary lighting system called pureLIGHT, a technology now licensed to third-party game developers. Such out-of-the-box thinking gives 3DI the edge in representing its client’s interests in the virtual world.
At the core of our development platform, 3DI utilizes the best available gaming technology. And yet, if required to meet our client’s expectations, 3DI is able to enhance and extended those systems with low-level modifications to the toolsets, physics engine, or related systems as needed. Millions of lines of custom coding, combined with in-house capabilities in advanced physics, engineering and artificial intelligence provide our clients with 3d vehicles such features as real-time compressible “soft” tires (an essential element for an accurate driving experience with heavy equipment), engineered articulated bodies, virtual hydraulic joints and hundreds of complex details needed for effective training. Likewise, 3DI’s proprietary dirt technology has advanced the state-of-the-art in the moving, loading, and blasting of all types of aggregate and dirt in interactive simulations.
3DI continues to advance these technologies with ongoing research and development in fire physics, dirt/aggregate systems, particle systems, and oil and gas reservoir dynamics. Developing such intricate and interlocking systems is the fun part for 3DI and we look forward to discussing interesting and challenging projects and ideas.
The Epic® Unreal™ Engine provides 3DI with a robust and highly advanced development platform – in fact, it is the ideal solution for today’s demanding simulation projects. 3DI has augmented Epic’s core system with its own proprietary systems and processes.
First released in 1998, the award-winning Unreal Engine is known for cutting-edge graphics and a best-of-breed toolset. The Unreal Engine has recently added massive world support, multi-processor support, next-generation console optimizations, and clearly has one of the most mature tool pipelines in the industry. Most importantly, the Unreal Engine toolset is designed specifically to accelerate developers' productivity for ultra-complex, next-generation content.
Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is the three-time consecutive winner of Game Developer magazine’s Best Engine Front Line Award and is this year's Hall of Fame inductee. Unreal Engine 3 has also been recognized as the number one game engine by Develop magazine.
Competitors using less mature engines or in-house solutions are not likely to match 3DI’s feature-rich interactive simulators or our accelerated development cycles.
There is hardly a more important visual element in 3d simulations than proper light effects. Yet proper lighting historically has proven to be one of the more difficult features to implement in interactive simulations. Around the gaming and visualization world, countless hours of developer’s time is expended on getting light effects the way they want. It is a tedious, repetitious, and very expensive process which greatly affects the project’s time line.
pureLIGHT was born of necessity. When existing lighting solutions failed to deliver the realism of natural light or the myriad of effects of artificial lighting, 3DI’s resourceful crew went to the drawing boards and starting from scratch, designed and built an innovative lighting engine which became pureLIGHT. In 2009, 3DI’s lighting technology took on a life of its own and pureLIGHT is now being licensed to third-party game developers around the world.
The feel of a simulator is intangible, but as the saying goes, “You know it when you see it.”
From project concept stage to final delivery, 3DI works closely with expert trainers and subject matter experts (the “trainers of trainers”) to insure that 3DI’s simulations are “tweaked” until they have surpassed that vaguely defined threshold where the simulator just feels right. One test as to whether a simulator has the right feel is if expert operators quickly fall back into their practiced operating routines while performing advanced maneuvers on the simulator.
Interestingly, we have seen expert operators on a 3DI simulator perform front-end wheelies and similar tricks with a 10-ton piece of equipment (packing a bucket load of dirt) and everything about their smile acknowledges that that 3DI nailed the essential elements of that machine. (It has been said that such maneuvers can indeed be done by skilled operators on real machines, but clearly, it is not a recommended practice.)
George Smith, President & CEO TELUS World of Science
