Supporting Art Production for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Our distributed teams across Virtuos Shanghai, Virtuos Xi’an, and Glass Egg – A Virtuos Studio helped Asobo to scale production more efficiently by delivering hundreds of assets including photorealistic vehicles, detailed environments, and character art. Virtuos served as a close development partner to Asobo Studio, helping the team meet their ambitious launch schedule and deliver a visually stunning, immersive flight experience on PC and Xbox Series X|S.
- Worked closely with Asobo Studio, alongside other Microsoft partners who helped develop the game
- Delivered over 700 high-quality assets, including props, trees, hangars, vehicles, character clothing, and hairstyles
- Crafted 3 flyable airplane models and 18 non-playable airplane variants with 115 unique liveries
- Produced 161 pieces of clothing for career mode and 27 distinct character hairstyles
- Created 129 fully set-dressed hangars, 200 detailed props, and 9 tree types with 58 variations
- Scaled a multidisciplinary team of over 150 artists
- Demonstrated exceptional quality and speed, resulting in a 250% expanded scope and early completion of our mandates
- Centralized project management of our mandates via Virtuos Shanghai to streamline communication, iteration, and production efficiency for Asobo Studio
Our teams at Virtuos Shanghai and Glass Egg created a number of detailed 3D models for both active (flyable) and passive (non-flyable) airplanes. We delivered 3 highly detailed flyable planes including models such as the ES30, Cl415, and FA-18E, alongside 18 non-playable planes with numerous variations.
Our vehicle artists also designed 115 unique liveries, carefully painted and textured to maintain visual authenticity while fitting the simulation’s stringent quality standards. Production involved blockouts, low and high-poly modeling, UV mapping, texture baking, LOD creation, animation, and final engine integration.
Virtuos Shanghai contributed environment art, creating detailed sets of assets that help bring parts of the in-game world to life. This includes 129 hangars, fully set-dressed to enhance vehicle selection areas, 200 props, and 9 tree species spanning 58 total variations to populate natural environments more realistically. The production pipeline covered sculpting, modeling, UV and texture baking, level of detail (LOD) creation, animation, and integration, ensuring optimized performance across platforms.
Virtuos also created character art, producing 161 unique pieces of clothing and 27 hairstyles to expand the options available for the game’s career mode. Using a combination of photogrammetry and traditional 3D modeling techniques, artists across Virtuos Shanghai, Xi’an, and Glass Egg sculpted, retopologized, textured, and integrated these assets with optimized LODs. The hairstyles were crafted using advanced hair card techniques and textures with meticulous placement and LOD management, ensuring realistic and performant characters.
“Our partnership rocked! The team was on point understanding our needs and they perfectly matched our expectations. The timeline was tight, especially considering the quantity and type of assets to produce. Props, vegetation, clothes, haircuts, liveries, level building, and even airplanes. Virtuos handled it all with skill! ”
Benjamin Rieubland
Art Outsourcing Manager, Asobo Studio
Virtuos’ collaboration with Asobo Studio was distinguished by seamless communication and rapid iteration, enabled by a centralized point of contact to simplify production in Virtuos Shanghai. This facilitated early identification of key production opportunities, streamlined project management, and proactive scope expansion.
Asobo Studio praised the partnership for matching their high-quality expectations while meeting demanding timelines, establishing Virtuos as a trusted primary partner for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
