TURNING DATA INTO ENGAGING CONTENT

Data is important. It fuels the decisions we make, guides our next steps, but most importantly, data measures the true impact and potential of our products and services. In this particular case study, we used data from a flight simulator to show the flight path of an aircraft and it's potential.

Not every pilot has the opportunity to use a flight simulator, not every airline has the potential to see the aircraft they are buying from a unique, but important perspective, and not every engineer gets to see their work flying 20,000 feet in the air close up. Seeing what an aircraft can do when pushed to the limits not only benefits the engineers but also the clients, pilots, and customers.

Transforming data to content allows you to communicate your data to a wider audience. It also helps inform your customer of what you offer, while increasing brand recognition.

In this particular video, our client wanted to see the plane on the flight path but be able to move the camera wherever in space around the aircraft to see different elements. This would be impossible, or at the very least, challenging and expensive to shoot the actual plane. We opted to use data from a flight simulator and google earth.

Using a file that contained all the flight path data from the flight simulator including speed, heading, pitch, angle, latitude, longitude, bank, and roll, we were able to create a flight path using blender's scripting tool.

Blender's scripting tool allowed us to convert all the data into a curve that our aircraft model could follow. This curve would also prove useful to visualize the flight path.

It was merely a matter of introducing a model of our aircraft into blender, then adjusting a few parameters, and we were able to provide a creative and beneficial visual for our client and those who utilize their products and services.

To increase the accuracy, because accurate data is paramount, we imported Google Earth's satellite data into our scene.

Data drives results. However, sometimes, we must highlight the data in order to rightly interpret it. In this particular case study, we increased the scale of the airplane by 15x so that the camera could view not only the flight path but also how the airplane behaved during it's flight. This resulted in minor banks, rolls, and pitches being over exaggerated. We fixed this issue by manually adjusting keyframes. While this may seem, on the surface, to distort the data, it in the end preserved the most important data and motion of the aircraft.

If you or your team is looking for ways to visualize your data in new and unique ways, request a consultation through our form below!

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