One of the features of my current project airport is the Raupo walkway, a small area within the airport bounds which has a meandering path. At both ends of the path are carvings of Māori gods, and while I wanted to include these, I also wanted to do them justice, and this sort of thing is different enough from an airport building that I wasn't sure how I'd do. So I thought I'd try a 3D AI tool. I signed up to 3DAI Studio, which offered access to a few different AI tools, so that I could figure out how it all worked. This wasn't the cheapest subscription, so after a month I settled on just one of the included tools, Tripo, which is aimed at game-ready low poly models, unlike the rest which would default to 50.000 vertices per model. I found I was using this more often that the others, as didn't require such strong decimation to reduce the vertices.
Here's one of the carvings, I don't recall which tool actually created it.
I also wanted to replace an old model of the Volvo loader which the timber yard bordering another airfield used for timber, I'd originally made this myself, and it was pretty basic. This was a tricky ask of AI, as I didn't have the original photo I took of it years ago. I searched for pics online, but had trouble finding something with similar timber grips. I tried to get an AI image built, but this wasn't much use, it seemed to be a classic case of AI hallucinations, and some results were downright weird. In the end I found a tiny pic of the actual loader on the timber yard's website, and I gave that to a prompt-creation tool. It built a prompt which gave me a good enough image for the 3D tool to build a model. This has been though a number of versions, and I have now released this scenery (NZTI) with an early version, but here's the latest result:
I also made some cars for NZTI, as there are plenty scattered about the airfield in various states of decay.
Cars are actually a good candidate for AI, this one here was made from a single side-on photo, but I found that I could just use a text prompt for most vehicles -- the colour, year, make and model would give me a great result. Here's the result of an experiment clicking the 'use pearl effect' button, giving my own Hyundai Accent a flash paint job:
Another use for a text prompt, simply giving the make and model number, was this digital printer:
Some AI models are just for a starting point, to get object aligned and sizing right, here's a fuel station which is entirely 3D generated from a photo here, but will eventually be replaced with my own custom models built on top.
Although I was originally paying over NZ$50 a month, changing to Tripo reduced this to about NZ$35. I'm not sure how many months I can keep this, but it is fun to play with.
For me, the best results come from my own photo or photos, given that you can give Tripo front, back and side images to improve things. When I don't have a good photo the next best thing is to have AI create one, I use Google Gemini for this as it is free and gives reliable results.
I am currently aiming to get close to the vertex count of default cars with my fleet, they hover around 1100 faces. Here's a shot showing the face count on my car (in front) and default cars, for just a few faces more I get a much cleaner result. The only thing missing here is PBR, but Tripo can give you PBR textures if you want, they just need some work to suit the sim. Speaking of textures, these are included in a zipped model download, JPGs, which I normally save a PNG, but lately I've just been sticking with the JPG, which Blender will use happily and ends up as a MSFS texture file pretty much automatically.
Overall, this is easier and more effective that I thought it would be, although you do need to go through a low of experimentation initially to find what works best for various models. There are really only a few cases where I'd use AI, as I prefer to model more planar objects -- such as buildings -- using Blender. Speaking of which, I use Blender's Decimate along with vertex deletion to create LODs, and I tend to get a slightly better result that using Tripo's retopology.
I think that NZTI included less than a dozen AI models on release, but I'm not sure how much to include in my current project.
It is certainly worthwhile signing up for one of these AI tools, a month is plenty of time to figure out if this is for you. Tripo gives me 3500 credits per month for my US$20, although a model generally costs 35 credits and an extra 20 for the texture. You can get it half price if you pay for a year, and get a larger plan, but I'm happy with mine for the moment.
Here's one of the carvings, I don't recall which tool actually created it.
I also wanted to replace an old model of the Volvo loader which the timber yard bordering another airfield used for timber, I'd originally made this myself, and it was pretty basic. This was a tricky ask of AI, as I didn't have the original photo I took of it years ago. I searched for pics online, but had trouble finding something with similar timber grips. I tried to get an AI image built, but this wasn't much use, it seemed to be a classic case of AI hallucinations, and some results were downright weird. In the end I found a tiny pic of the actual loader on the timber yard's website, and I gave that to a prompt-creation tool. It built a prompt which gave me a good enough image for the 3D tool to build a model. This has been though a number of versions, and I have now released this scenery (NZTI) with an early version, but here's the latest result:
I also made some cars for NZTI, as there are plenty scattered about the airfield in various states of decay.
Cars are actually a good candidate for AI, this one here was made from a single side-on photo, but I found that I could just use a text prompt for most vehicles -- the colour, year, make and model would give me a great result. Here's the result of an experiment clicking the 'use pearl effect' button, giving my own Hyundai Accent a flash paint job:
Another use for a text prompt, simply giving the make and model number, was this digital printer:
Some AI models are just for a starting point, to get object aligned and sizing right, here's a fuel station which is entirely 3D generated from a photo here, but will eventually be replaced with my own custom models built on top.
Although I was originally paying over NZ$50 a month, changing to Tripo reduced this to about NZ$35. I'm not sure how many months I can keep this, but it is fun to play with.
For me, the best results come from my own photo or photos, given that you can give Tripo front, back and side images to improve things. When I don't have a good photo the next best thing is to have AI create one, I use Google Gemini for this as it is free and gives reliable results.
I am currently aiming to get close to the vertex count of default cars with my fleet, they hover around 1100 faces. Here's a shot showing the face count on my car (in front) and default cars, for just a few faces more I get a much cleaner result. The only thing missing here is PBR, but Tripo can give you PBR textures if you want, they just need some work to suit the sim. Speaking of textures, these are included in a zipped model download, JPGs, which I normally save a PNG, but lately I've just been sticking with the JPG, which Blender will use happily and ends up as a MSFS texture file pretty much automatically.
Overall, this is easier and more effective that I thought it would be, although you do need to go through a low of experimentation initially to find what works best for various models. There are really only a few cases where I'd use AI, as I prefer to model more planar objects -- such as buildings -- using Blender. Speaking of which, I use Blender's Decimate along with vertex deletion to create LODs, and I tend to get a slightly better result that using Tripo's retopology.
I think that NZTI included less than a dozen AI models on release, but I'm not sure how much to include in my current project.
It is certainly worthwhile signing up for one of these AI tools, a month is plenty of time to figure out if this is for you. Tripo gives me 3500 credits per month for my US$20, although a model generally costs 35 credits and an extra 20 for the texture. You can get it half price if you pay for a year, and get a larger plan, but I'm happy with mine for the moment.