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Aim: I am a serving firefighter in the UK. With a passion for 3D/AI visualisation, I see a lot of potential for creating training assets.

     For 13 years I was a freelance 3DSMax/Zbrush artist/animator. Unfortunately my strength and commitment to the work was not matched by steady income. To help plug the gaps between projects that sometimes would take months to complete, I started working locally as a retained firefighter. That being 2 hour drill a week and responding to emergency incidents on an alerter whilst I was working at home. I found a great deal of reward in helping people and developing myself as a firefighter. Nine years later I am now a crew manager on a wholetime station.

    I've always seen an opportunity to improve the training assets used to demonstrate fire fighting equipment, tactics and fire behaviour. Sadly budgets are tight and limited by brigade. It's very difficult for a fire service to commit to spending on something new, esspecially when those budgets are already stretched for personnel, fire appliances, station/equipment maintainance, fire prevention and protection.

    My goal is to offer these assets freely, under creative commons license, on a global scale. So fire fighters in developing and war torn countries would have access to the same high quality assets available to them as any. Further as a retained firefighter on a quiet rural station I would defintely have benefitted from videos to refresh and deepen my knowledge whilst minimally impacting the time I have with my family and in my primary employment.

     Therefore the funding model I am hoping to use is based on goodwill. If you like the assets and they are of benefit to you, I ask for any donation no matter how small. The funds would be used to improve the work by maintaining my workstation and investing in better software and access to higher quality AI video generation. If the funds are more than I can justify spending on my setup then I will use them to pay other freelancers (full circle) to produce work in this vein. If that were the case then I also have some ideas for software that would increase operational reponse and incident management, which I do not have the programming skills to code myself.

    In no way do I want to disparage the fine training and development in fire service training centres all over the country, however I do believe there is scope to improve the material provided to firefighters, esspecially neurodivergent and 'visual demonstration' based learners, of whom in the fire service we are legion.

    Initially I have some ideas for videos that are too beneficial to overlook. These would explain better than I ever could in writing what I imagine. However, I am hopeful that firefighters all over the world with good ideas and vision would make suggestions, get involved and vote for what video to make next.

    I intend to make the assets available on youtube, interact with the community via live stream and make them downloadable for local playback. The only stipulation being that users do not wipe the watermark, edit the videos and they do provide a link to the channel for further watching.

Stay Safe,

Cai

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 25th August 2025 at 7:22pm