Bring on the wood and sheet metal! Break out your saw! Cut the pieces to size, assemble them, paint them and… voila! You’ve built your own airplane. Now it’s time to get it off the ground… will it fly…?

As of today, Less Rain’s new 3-D model application with integrated flight simulator, the Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab, will be online, a 3-part game based on Red Bull’s Flugtag event.

Step One: The fuselage, wings and pitch elevator are cut out of Styrofoam, cardboard, wood or scrap metal. The pieces are then automatically assembled into a 3-D airplane. Material and shape will later play an important role in the machine’s flying properties.

Step Two: Customizing the parts. This can be done by uploading your own photos, designs and patterns or, alternatively, using brushes to paint the machine ‘by hand’. The results might be anything from a realistic looking airplane to an abstract flying artwork.

Step Three: The prospective pilot can test the quality of his custom-designed aircraft and its flying capabilities amidst stunning natural scenery in the 3-D flight simulator. The machine is launched from a floating launch pad using the arrow keys. First the wings beat softly then the plane takes off energetically into the big blue sky.

The goal now is to cover as much distance as possible. To achieve this, users may experiment with acrobatic maneuvers, collect cans of Red Bull to refuel and employ the thermal updrafts – but they must beware of the bumpy crosswinds!

Points are given after each flight for distance covered and piloting style. Loops, drifts, rolls, low-level flight and other maneuvers are rewarded. In addition, the other users rate the plane’s design. A total score is calculated which, if it’s good enough, may be included on a high score table.

Pilots can store their planes in a hangar where they can develop them further or try out new designs anytime. Another unique aspect of the game is that any user can take-off with any airplane and, what’s more, can change and improve it to their own tastes.

The back-end and user administration part of Flight Lab has been developed by Signal7, our partner of choice when it comes to enterprise level, tailor-made database solutions.

Related Links:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Pilot avatar motion capture demo and the original Paperdude post
Signal7

Update:
We’re Site of the Day at the FWA! Cheers, Rob!

Update II:
We made it Site of the Month at the FWA! That’s just fantastic, thanks everybody at the FWA!

Update III:
Thank you UltraShock, for the BombShock Award! And we are Adobe Site of the Day for March 4th!

Continue reading: Developing Flight Lab

Public Service Anouncement:
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At the beginning it’s always simple. “Everybody draw crazy airplanes and then fly them.” We wanted a fun experience, no boring modeling session, no nerdy flight simulation.

Just draw an outline, booom!, airplane wing

Flight Lab uses Papervision3D to show 3-D models and these models have to be created in a very specific way. Drawing an arbitrary free hand line is the opposite of that, you can draw everything, in any way. That’s why the Flight Lab builder has to do a lot of interpretations. Did you just draw a correction to an existing outline? Are there intersections? Can we simplify the outline while preserving its characteristic look so the Flash Player has less stuff to compute? Next, Flight Lab has to break up the shape into triangles because Papervision3D only understands models made out of triangles. At the end, we add thickness and create the final model by extruding the outline. We’re done! Now let’s head over to the game.

Fly like birds do and crash like airplanes

Flight Lab gives you the real thing: It’s a 6DOF (degrees of freedom) flight simulator modeled by a physics engine in 3D using rigid body dynamics. Real airplane wings can be described by specific lift and drag coefficients, depending on how quickly and from which angle the air flows over a wing section. That’s what Flight Lab does.

On the other hand you’re flying by flapping wings. The flying experience had to be as physical as possible using as few buttons as possible. So we put a bird into the simulator, added additional forces and offered the user the same control a bird has over its body – if it’s not a chicken. 4 keys, 2 optional keys and one space bar (hint!) oughta be enough for everyone.

Flying Pigs

The flight behaviour depends on the material you choose and the shape of the airplane. But to be honest, we ended up limiting this influence a little bit. As an aviation engineer you just have to design some things exactly the right way or the airplane won’t fly at all. Crazy airplanes can quickly become impossible to handle in a real flight simulator. However, we wanted people to create imaginative planes and fly them in our simulator even though they may never take off in the real world. So we decided on a compromise. Huge wings for example will do what you expect them to do but they can have any shape and any position. In the end though, a well engineered aircraft will still fly better and bring you more score points.

Hand-crafted, with a lot of love

The game itself has a lot of elements running at the same time and a lot of effort went into making this possible. Flight Lab is using Papervision3D 1.5 and builds on the efforts of a vivid open-source community. Nevertheless, there are limits when it comes to creating a game experience of this scale. Nearly every element you see in the game posed a significant problem of its own. Be it quality of graphics, a panorama, a water surface, airplane shadow, clouds, wind or general depth-sorting problems. And often something feasible turned out to be too slow in context. Game logic, stunt analysis, sound and physics simulation quickly add up.

Guest Star

PaperDude! Of course you know him and he’s back big time. He will be acting as your avatar so treat him with respect. His body follows motion capture data from Lord of the Rings and Saturday Night Fever. Real time, baby!

Plus everything else

Next to all this fancy game and 3D stuff, Flight Lab is also a website which offers saving, browsing and sharing airplanes. It’s a Rich Internet Application in the true sense of the word and a site that supports deep linking and browser history. If you want your friend to play the game directly using a specific airplane, just send him the link in the browser address bar.

Flight Lab is a prominent example of what you can do today with Flash Player 9. It was a fun ride and we learned a lot. Let’s see what the future holds, the flying pigs are here to stay.

Shortly after introducing the world’s thinnest notebook Apple is surprising us with another superlative, the world’s thinnest CD rack - the new iShelf touch. It’s ultra thin, and ultra unlike anything else.

Now you can really show off your CD collection, not just on your tiny iPod touch screen or your notebook, but mounted on the wall in your stylish living room.

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satire of an adidas spot.

and this is the original with all the heavily branded kids