Quadcopter Simulator Olympic Park Model

With the Rio Olympics now on the TV, I thought it might be a good idea for an experiment to see how many 3D models of the London Olympic Park are in the public domain. A quick search for "London 2012" on the Sketchup Warehouse turned up models for the Arcelor Mittal Orbit, the main stadium, aquatic centre, velodrome, BMX track, copper box and marshmallow. Then I wondered how easy it would be to drop those models into Unity and fly around them with the quadcopter simulator?

The import path is rather complicated, as I had to take the Sketchup 2015 model, export it using 3DS, load this and the textures into Blender, save the Blender file and then import that file and the texture directory into Unity. Inevitably, there were big problems with the conversion process, loss of textures and features in models that are not implemented in Unity. It was a huge learning process as this is actually the first time I've got textured models into Unity successfully. Even then, if you look at the stadium model where the scoreboard should be, it actually shows the CASA logo. This seems to be a limitation in how Unity is importing the texture files as they're both called 'logo.png' and it's obviously found the CASA one in preference to the Olympic Stadium one. After that I started creating separate "Texture" folders on the same level as the Blender model file and putting each model into its own sub-directory.

It's not bad for a day's work, but I never did manage to get the textures onto the Velodrome, so I gave up in the end. This is a job for a graphic artist, not a software developer, so I'm going to go back to fixing the problems in the flight simulator model to get it to fly right. You can see that the flight controller model is very basic in the way that the quad is bouncing around and drifting badly. That is my favourite camera shot, though. We've all wanted to slide down the roof of the aquatic centre, so build up speed as you go over the top, come off the other side fast and spin through 180 degrees to look back at it as you drift backwards with the momentum. Spin and drift.