A model with 80,000 parts and up to nine years of support: the i3 Corps experience

The American company i3 Corps, which builds virtual trainers for US government customers, has described how its 3D pipeline is organized. The company stores vehicle models separately from applications via Unity Addressables. It started building its own asset catalog, but abandoned its development and deployed Unity Asset Manager in a government cloud. Now i3 Corps is working with Unity on what this service should become for pipelines like its own.

The company's challenge is a rare one for ordinary 3D production. A model here is a digital twin of real equipment, and work on it does not end when the application ships. Supporting a single model can last eight to nine years, and ten to fifteen new ones are added each year. Marketing director Daniel Starkey and systems architect John Thornton shared their experience in a guest post on the Unity blog dated November 10, 2026.

An asset that outlives the procurement program

The company has built hundreds of training scenarios in Unity. They cover most of the aviation training i3 Corps supports, as well as Navy platforms and ground vehicles. The applications reach classrooms at military sites across the country through a distribution platform. i3 Corps built it itself; it is government-owned and runs in a secure government cloud.

The hardest part, according to the authors, lies beneath the applications, in the 3D library. Equipment changes constantly: a new component enters service, the manufacturer redesigns a part, the customer sends a fresh CAD package. Each time, someone has to determine which parts are being replaced, which model this affects, and which classroom applications depend on it.

«One of our aircraft models has 80,000 components — down to the nuts and bolts».
— Daniel Starkey and John Thornton, i3 Corps

The same applies to source data. Models are assembled from CAD packages from various sources and from in-house photogrammetry. A single capture trip can yield millions of photographs of one vehicle. A few years later, new CAD arrives for the same platform, and you need to understand what the old model was made from in order to compare them. The authors write that such an answer is easily lost and expensive to reconstruct. Meanwhile, the assets are edited for years by ten art teams — weekly, and sometimes daily.

One airframe, many helicopters

The authors illustrate the scale with the UH-60 Black Hawk. The US Army alone has the UH-60A, L, M and V, the HH-60M medevac variant, and specialized aircraft for special operations forces and other missions. Add the Navy, the Air Force and foreign operators, and the number of configurations requiring training grows quickly. Most of them use the same fuselage, tail boom, rotor system and landing gear. The UH-60V retains most of the L-model airframe and gains a digital cockpit. The HH-60M is built on the UH-60M with medical equipment and mission systems.

If every version is modeled from scratch, the same parts have to be rebuilt, checked and maintained all over again. That is why i3 Corps considers the right approach to be a shared base model made of reusable components, where each variant adds only what actually differs: structure, mechanical systems, avionics or mission equipment.

Models outside the build, catalog in the cloud

To avoid keeping models inside the applications, the company uses Unity Addressables. Models sit in a catalog separate from the build, load on demand and are cached locally. An asset referenced by fifteen applications is stored once, and the applications themselves only need to change when their code changes.

For tracking the assets themselves, the company initially went its own way: on top of version control and automation, it began building a database and search. In the end it chose not to develop this catalog further and deployed Unity Asset Manager in a government cloud environment.

What the service can do is clear from its documentation. Asset versions are tracked linearly, the needed version can be tagged with a label for a specific pipeline, and versions are divided into frozen and editable ones. Different teams can use and modify the same asset in different projects without interfering with each other. Dependencies link, for example, a prefab with its FBX and materials, so a colleague imports everything together. On July 16, 2026, an interactive dependency graph appeared in the web version. It helps make sense of complex structures such as assemblies and understand which assets an edit will touch. The hierarchical view of multi-part assets was updated at the same time. Since May 2026, optimized and converted copies are created as separate linked assets and do not change the version of the source.

There are also automatic metadata: when a model is uploaded, the service itself counts triangles, vertices, materials and textures, the maximum texture size and the number of separate objects. It also detects whether there is a rig, animation and UVs. Custom fields can be text, boolean, numeric, or hold a link, a user or a date.

Where the service does not fit yet

The company has promised a separate article on where Asset Manager does not yet fit its pipeline and what it is building together with Unity to close the gap. i3 Corps will also be at I/ITSEC 2026 in Orlando from November 30 to December 3, booth #1761.

More broadly, the authors see it this way: the government has accumulated enormous volumes of CAD and parametric models. Much of it was delivered under contracts years ago, and finding that data now is practically impossible. Demand, in their estimation, is shifting toward simulation, visualization and content generation with the help of AI.

What this means for studios

Comparing the needs of i3 Corps with the Asset Manager documentation reveals weak spots. In the web interface, dependencies are added through an editing mode and only in one direction, down the chain; when uploading from the Unity editor, dependencies can be exported as separate assets automatically. For an assembly of 80,000 parts, that means a great deal of manual work without such automation. The graph shows what an edit will affect, but a ready-made comparison of «what changed between versions at the part level» is not in the feature description — and that is precisely the task the authors name as the next one. The service does not convert units in numeric fields; they have to be spelled out in the field name.

There are also questions about licensing. Asset Manager seats are included in all Unity plans, but all roles in Enterprise- and Industry-tier organizations are available only with Enterprise or Industry Floating seats. The Collaborate seat there is limited to the consumer role. When an organization is upgraded, seats that were not moved to the new tier are reduced to view rights. There are no prices on the seats page. The public documentation also offered no description of how the government cloud option differs from the regular one, or of how an updated model reaches an old copy in the cache of a classroom computer.

The same problems are probably familiar to everyone whose assets live longer than a single project: industrial visualization, archviz with multi-year projects, studios that maintain a shared vehicle library for several games. For them, the promised breakdown of the limitations may prove more useful than the current post.

Why did i3 Corps abandon its own catalog in favor of Asset Manager: the cost of maintaining its own code, government cloud requirements, a bet on influence within Unity?