In 2021 my team developed an innovative 3D Engine Trainer for FlightSafety Engine Courses. We won a Top Flight Award for innovations in Aircraft Maintenance Training, click on the image below to watch a short video AIN developed on YouTube.
Below is a screengrab of the article, click on it for a direct link to AIN Online's article (our product is at the bottom of the page; I think they saved the best for last)
In 2018, a director for the FlightSafety Maintenance Training program in Montreal walked into my office asking for an Interactive way to train Engines in the classroom. I sat down with my team and in 2 weeks we developed a rough draft for the Virtual Engine Trainer "VET". Shortly after the prototype, we were asked to refine the product to include feature requests like Part Outlines, Bookmarks, Editable Backgrounds, X-Ray, and Part movement.
In 2020, this was the first Virtual Product approved to replace Practical Training by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency!
My involvement in this project originally came in the form of project support; I made sure the project met the needs of the learning center and coordinated the development effort. Interestingly, in 2019 I was promoted to a Product Lead at FlightSafety, so I began brainstorming and coordinating the implementation of improvements of immersive and virtual training for the company. In this role I was able to develop and implement a production pipeline to lower the polygon count of the massive 3D Engine Models.
In the examples here, you can see that I'm using a software called PIXYZ to lower the Polygon count of this enormous engine from 7 million polygons to 2.3 million polygons. Below you can see that I also came up with a production pipeline in PIXYZ to UV unwrap the thousands of components in the engine. UV unwapping allows textures to fit nicely around the 3D Model. Now developing one of these products from conception has gone from 7 months of effort to about 2 weeks.
Above is a screenshot from one of the newer VET Products