Hello, comrades!

Three months ago, in our Dev Blog #26, we featured a high-polygonal 3D model of the MiG-15 cockpit and provided an overview of its instruments. At the same time, some of you in the comments expressed concerns that "all this beauty will be lost when the high-polygon model is remade into a game model." Then we answered, 'Don't worry, nothing will be lost; on the contrary, it will only get better.' And today, you can compare the screenshots from the 26th edition with the screenshots of the finalized game model of the cockpit.

The final model has three orders of magnitude (500−1000 times) fewer polygons than the original high-polygon model (although there are still more than 200 thousand of them, which is 1.5 times more than in Great Battles). But look at the visual result — do you notice any loss of detail? Not at all, and the final model looks even more complex and detailed.

This is achieved by applying modern modeling approaches, which include the so-called "sculpting" of a highly polygonal three-dimensional model of an object, complete with all chamfers, dents, bumps, threads, splines, and other small three-dimensional details. If entirely composed of polygons, such a model would be too large, and applying texturing to it using the old method would be a nightmare. Moreover, because of the large number of adjacent small details and the need for indents in texture mapping (so-called "padding"), the efficiency of texture use for such a model will be much lower than for a less polygonal model. As a result, a "drawn" screw in modern graphics processing appears to be visually much more detailed than the same one, but rendered as a three-dimensional model. Just look at this.

And all this works in real-time in the simulator, which features numerous other objects besides this one cockpit. This effect is achieved thanks to PBR technology, which enables each pixel of the model’s surface texture to have not only color but also relief and material properties of the surface.

As a result, we get visual results that were completely unattainable with the old approaches and technologies. You could add more and more polygons, but that would degrade performance and texture resolution. Switching to modern graphics technologies is like discovering a new spatial dimension. What used to be either impossible or incredibly time-consuming is now routine and a standard industry practice.

Moreover, based on the example of the models of ground vehicles that we showed you in previous issues of our Dev Blog, you can see that while the quality has increased, without exaggeration, by an order of magnitude, the production time has remained quite comparable to the old ones. This is precisely what, in the history of technology, is typically referred to as a technological breakthrough. When we started the Korea project, it was a breakthrough that became one of our main goals, as it was impossible to implement these technologies within the framework of the previous engine and the legacy of old content. Yes, it was not an easy decision for us, associated with a lot of risks, but when we started working on "Korea," the team had been waiting for a new step in development for several years, and this step was taken.

It should be noted that technology alone does not determine visual quality. The second component of the result that strikes the viewer’s imagination is the artistic vision. In other projects that utilize similar technologies, not all content can have the same impact. Technology is a tool, without which a decent result is impossible. Still, the tool must be in the hands of a master, a true artist who understands and, somewhere at the level of subconsciousness, feels how the strokes create a masterpiece. And here we have also succeeded — in recent years, we have made a considerable effort to concentrate real experts, professionals, and fans of their work in the 3D modeling department. Technical artists who not only understand, but also feel the texture of metal, and not just some abstract metal, but metal painted in a certain way, and that has had a specific use. And not only metal, but also many other materials.

A simulator can not be just a copy of reality, because in any case, you see its world through a monitor or VR device, which has a limited resolution and range of brightness. Modern graphics cards still can't perform full ray tracing in real-time to accurately physically render complex shapes. All this must be known and taken into account by the artist, in a certain sense, by realizing the play of light and shadows in textures and applying several specific technologies from modern graphic editors.

A lot of knowledge, skills, and experience of artists and programmers are necessary to make a simulator that can impress you with its visual component.

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