Model of the Week: Flight Helmet

This page is acting as a placeholder, after on old twitter post from two years back got popular 

Back then (with a completely different homepage, where we unfortunately don’t have the original post any more) we hosted a weekly series of a “Model of the week”, optimizing each week a different 3D model for optimal display in Web browsers and mobile devices.

2019 version

Back then our focus was on creating a good visual result, while making the data faster to transmit and faster to render as well. However, we didn’t crunch it down as much as we could have done, actually, and in addition our tech has improved quite a bit since then. For example, new versions of RapidCompact will by default use a dedicated atlas in PNG format for the semi-transparent parts (here: the glasses with dirt on them), while using another format for the maps of the opaque parts, making those maps more easy to compress (e.g., using JPEG or KTX2 with Basis-ETC1S).

2021 version

Because of the new interest in this post, we quickly created a new optimized version of the model. This time, we used our cloud service (which wasn’t available back then) and simply dialed in the default parameters plus draco dompression (in the GLB export settings) as well as a target resolution of 30K faces. Here’s how the model looked like after upload (including the stats and visualization of real-world size):

Here are the stats for the old and new versions:

As one can see, the new version is much smaller, yet has two times the number of maps because of the aforementioned optimization (separation of transparent and opaque parts) – also, our simplifier and other aspects affecting the compression have improved a bit. Another advantage of our 2021 cloud system was that we could easily create an embed with one or two clicks to make it available here:

However, what might be actually more interesting is the fact that now, you can try on the FlightHelmet yourself, using AR on your phone – why don’t you give it a try?