Good day! The other day I came across someone asking the question "How much
does a simulator actually help in learning fpv?" Another question we always
hear and have asked at some point ourselves is "What's the best way to get
started with FPV?" Today I'm going to give you my answers to both of these
questions by briefly going over a couple of things I teach in more detail in the
Fast Track FPV Course, specifically the best and most inexpensive way to get
started with FPV is by purchasing a good value future-proof transmitter and a
simulator with good flight physics. I go over the
rationale for my recommendations on a good value transmitter in this video -
"Best Beginner FPV Drone Kit" which you can access through the TMacFPV.com
Free Resources Page or through the link in the video description below. I'll also
go over the benefits of using FPV simulators, take a brief look at what I
consider to be the top 3 fpv simulators - Velocidrone, DRL, and Liftoff to
include cost, system requirements, and available support groups. This is not an
in-depth review of any FPV simulator. For that I'll refer you to SFPV's
52-minute review of what he considers to be the top 10 simulators for 2019 as
well as his blog post, both of which are available through links in the video
description below. Colby's top 3 in that video are also the
3 main ones I'll touch on here as well. I'll then actually use one of these top
3 FPV simulators to build a basic course using its track editor and go through a
few practice drills you can use to get started with FPV flight.
Sound good? Then give it a "thumbs up" below, share this video with your friends,
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Better" FPV fun, flights and racing stuff! First, why should we use simulators at
all? Well, they're a form of accelerated learning. Through their deliberate use
you'll learn to fly FPV and new maneuvers faster by using them than if
you only practiced with real quads. I said "deliberate" because you do in fact
need to practice with a purpose. Have an objective for your practice session. What
is it that you'll be working on to improve?
Flying around aimlessly, although maybe entertaining, will have less of an effect
on improving your flight skills. You can fly anytime - day or night, in any type of
weather, which is very convenient. They're quick to set up and start flying which
saves you time. You can practice your flight skills until they become second
nature and when you crash you can just hit the reset button instead of having
to go get your quad and relaunch it every time. To use them you only need a
transmitter which means you can start learning to fly without having purchased
goggles first. In fact, most people don't use goggles while flying simulators and
when you use them prior to actual flight you'll get most of your initial hard
crashes out of the way before you throttle up on a real quad. The world's
air forces have understood the importance of integrating simulator use
into pilot training for quite some time. The use of simulators enables
accelerated, low-cost and learning focused training. Recent
graduates of the US Air Force "Pilot Training Next" program spent six months
of learning to fly with simulators before their first flight in an actual
aircraft! In fact, they spent MORE time on the simulators than they did in actual
aircraft! Now I understand you're not learning to fly a fighter aircraft, but
the fact the world's air forces (whose lives depend on their skills) use
simulators this extensively should give you confidence knowing they'll be quite
useful to you in enhancing your FPV flight skills. Let's take a look at some
of the simulators that are out there. In my opinion, the three of the best flight
physics - most realistic (i.e. flight simulators as opposed to just games) also
with the most robust features currently in use, are Velocidrone, Drone Racing
League (or DRL), and Liftoff. All three of these you'll find useful for practice
and all three are similar in cost at this time. When looking for a simulator
to simulate real-world flying, the main thing to take into consideration is its
flight physics. Out of these three I find both Velocidrone and DRL to have the
best physics and there's another simulator out there called FPV Air 2
which can also be purchased on Steam for $4.99 that also has good physics but is
currently not as robust in features and tracks as these other three.
These are the system requirements for each of the three simulators previously
mentioned. I own and have used all three and the one I use primarily is Velocidrone.
Liftoff seems to take a while to load on my machine every time I go back
and forth between menus. Therefore, I don't use that one as much. Your
experience with any of these simulators however may be different than mine due
to your computer's configuration. Mine's not a high-end gaming computer. I happen
to be running a windows-based AMD Athlon X4 860k Quad Core 3.7 gigahertz
processor with the GeForce GTX 1050 TI graphics card. All three of these
simulators have different levels of presence on social media platforms with
their own followings. They all have Facebook and Instagram accounts and can
also be found on Twitch TV. All three also have their own Racing League
competitions which can be a lot of fun. To start using the Sims, all you have to
do is download and install them then calibrate your transmitter sticks which
on Velocidrone, DRL, and Liftoff is an easy process. Then it's just a matter of
entering the specific simulators "Training Mode" and each has their own
unique training section. Velocidrone has 44 different flight training videos.
14 are line-of-sight and 30 are FPV. All of which can be accessed under the
Support section of the Velocidrone.com website, on YouTube, or under the
Tutorials menu item in the simulator itself.
DRL has its own Train menu section which starts out at the beginner level in
angle mode which is a self leveling mode - which I don't necessarily think is a
good thing because sometimes it feels as though you're fighting the quad. If
you're in that mode practicing a lot you might end up forming bad habits which
you'll then need to overcome later. It stays in this beginner, self-leveling
mode for the first 34 training sessions. That's a lot of time to learn some bad
habits. It is, however, a good structured training program broken down into three
"Quests" at three different skill levels - beginner, intermediate, and pro
encompassing 54 different missions. The last 20 of which can be run on both
Intermediate (which is what they call angle limited or what's called in Betaflight
Acro Trainer) or also the Pro skill level (or
what they call "manual" which in Betaflight is called Acro mode). Liftoff has
nine tutorial videos within the game which are run on a blue grid-like
environment. Any of these three simulators will help you learn to fly
initially and also learn new maneuvers and you don't necessarily need to limit
yourself to just one - you may actually enjoy some features each one has
uniquely to itself. I've listed these simulators in the order of my preference
based on my opinion of their flight physics. However, you and others may have
a different opinion. Regardless of your choice of simulator, I highly recommend
using at least one of these for increasing your flight skills throughout
your journey and while practicing flight drills such as those few will be going
over next. The simulator we'll be using is Velocidrone and before we get
started with our few drills I wanted to demonstrate just how easy it is to build
your own track using Velocidrone. We go into track editor, create new track, empty
scene day, select scenery, and it brings this canvas up. This is our empty scene day.
The first thing we need to do is put a starting gate - this is one of the
required items for any track. So we'll place our gate there. For our drills,
we're just gonna use five flags. I'm going to select green ones and I'm gonna
put three in a row and then two over here.
This is gonna be our track for our practice flight drills. We'll be doing
4 practice drills with this particular track that we built. The first one we're
gonna do is we're going to start off hovering. We're gonna start with our
quadcopter on our start pad (or a launch pad) here which is normally the case.
What we're gonna do is practice hovering the quadcopter in front of this flag,
keeping these flags all in a line with each other as much as possible so when
our quadcopter drifts right or left we'll notice that these flags are no
longer in line with this flag from our line of sight. So what we want to focus
on is trying to maintain the same height above the ground, below the tops of these
flags, and keep these three flags in the same line. That's gonna be our first
drill. Our second drill that we'll do is, once again we'll start from our launch
pad, and we'll try to maintain our height below the tops of these flags and we'll
slowly fly forward with the quadcopter until we reach the first flag and then
we'll use the pitch stick and pitch back to slow our speed down. Then, we'll pitch
forward and go to the next flag and pitch back to slow down. Then we'll pitch
forward to go to the third flag and pitch back to slow down. Our
objective in learning this is slow forward flight and how to slow down when
you're in slow forward flight. The third practice drill we'll do is, once again
start from the launch pad, and we'll fly around these four flags practicing our
coordinated turns using both yaw and roll. We'll do that in one direction
and then we'll go ahead and do it in another direction. It's important to
keep in mind that you want to do your practice drills in both directions
so that you don't just get one predominant direction that you're used
to flying all the time. Our last practice drill we'll do during this
particular video is we'll work on more of our coordinated turns doing figure
8's around two of these flags. Those will
be tighter coordinated turns using both yaw and roll. Alright let's get to it!
We go to singleplayer. There's lots of quadcopters
that you can pick over here. I'm just gonna use the one that I always use Mode
2 Ghost. I'm gonna select the quadcopter. Then we select our scene (and there's
lots of scenes to choose from). Within each scene there's lots of tracks to
choose from. We're gonna go to our empty scene day and the custom track that we
just made for these particular flight drills and that would be "Simulator
Practice Drills." So we're gonna select that scenery and it's going to load.
We're currently looking out of our quadcopter's FPV camera and these are the
three flags directly in front of us. These are the two over on our left hand
side. First thing we want to do since we're practicing hovering is, we want to
lower our camera angle. We do that by hitting page down. You can see our
camera angle's going down. It's a lot easier to learn how to hover with a low
camera angle than it is trying to hover with a 45-degree camera angle! I'm going
to put my camera angle - let's just say 3 degrees. I'm also gonna toggle on
my sticks so that you can watch the sticks as I'm trying to hover keeping
below the top of the flag and these three flags in line with each other. So,
hover practice. I'm gonna purposely move left and right so that you can see the
flags are no longer in line with each other. Now let's get them back in
line as much as possible. Let's get past our launch pad and the idea is to hover
with those three flags in line as much as possible keeping your quadcopter
as still as possible and you're using very minute stick movements in order to
do this. You just keep practicing that while you're in "acro mode," this is
not self-leveling mode. Just keep practicing this until you get
comfortable doing the hover. I'm going to hit "R" to reset ourselves.
I'm gonna increase our camera angle just a little bit - let's say 7 degrees.
Now our next drill is slow forward flight and learn how to slow down.
We're gonna go to each flag and slow down. I'm gonna get over here on the side
and I'm gonna pitch back to slow down and pitch forward to go forward, and
pitch back to slow down, and pitch forward to go forward, and pitch back to
slow down. We're gonna reset ourselves. Our next drill is gonna be
coordinated turns in a square pattern - first to the left and to the right.
I'm going to increase our camera angle for that as well - let's just say 25
degrees and we'll go with that. Square pattern to the left (and you don't have
to go fast). Just try and maintain your altitude below the tips of the flags.
We're not in any hurry - we're just learning slow coordinated turns to the
left using both yaw and roll to the left in a square pattern. Then, as I
mentioned earlier, we want to do this both directions so we don't gain one
predominant side. Yaw and roll right, yaw and roll right, same direction -
both sticks moving in the same direction. Yaw and roll right.
Like that! I'm gonna reset. Our last drill for this particular video is
coordinated turn using more yaw and roll, this time in a figure 8 using 2 flags.
I'm gonna do that by increasing my camera angle to 45 degrees and
demonstrate this.
Figure 8's. Once again, we're not in any big hurry. We're just learning how to
do yaw and roll figure 8's around 2 obstacles. In this case, we just happen
to stick two flags in the ground. We could also extend that to maybe some
sort of slalom with three flags. One of the things I wanted to point out is how
realistic the flight physics are with Velocidrone. By doing these sorts of
practice drills over and over again,
you're forming good muscle memory based on good flight physics. So that, in a
nutshell, is my take on the value of FPV simulators for learning FPV and a quick
demo of how to use Velocidrone to both make your own track and for
practice flight drills. Please keep in mind Velocidroen, DRL and Liftoff can be used
for freestyle as well as racing through their large number of tracks available.
If you found this video useful, make sure to share it with your friends and head
on over to the TMacFPV.com site where you can find more free resources
and the Fast Track FPV Course - your clear flight path to FPV fun! Thanks for
your time. I'll see you next video. Clear Skies friend!