Category: F1 1994

1994 Progress Update

It’s been a while since our last update. This has several reasons. With rFactor1 quite outdated and rF2 not really on our horizon and summer comming in europe, our motivation is currently not as high as it was during the F1 2006 development. Nevertheless the inner core of the group continued working on this mod, slowly but steady. Here is some of the work we did the past month.

First thing is the helmet shape.  Our 2006 helmet shapes were done by Eugenio Faria who did a great job on them. But for 1994 we needed something completely different. We took the Senna helmet as reference and created a pretty nice looking shape. As it was our first own helmet to model we ran into a few difficulties during the modeling process as well as during creating the mapping.

To be prepared for rFactor 2 and its animation capabilities we also created a complete new, rigged, driver model. We will present that later when we have something more to show than the blank model.

James (Juluka) and Dennis (mediocre) already started painting the 94 helmets. (These are just screengrabs from Maya)

One final note about the mod and its platform. We are aiming to bring this mod as a rFactor2 mod. But we’re still looking around for other possibilities. We don’t know enough about rF2 yet and with another Simbin game coming (the gt game announced a while back) we’re still not sure which platform is going to make it. We’ll decide that as soon as rF2 or other promising platforms are available.

Tyrrell 1994 WIP

Fernando silently continues his updates on the Tyrrell. The car is undergoing a big update, that involved body proportions and detail work. Work on the body is nearly completed. The wheelbase was redone based on car specification and technical regulations. The sidepod and the cockpit opening were updated, remodelling of the splitter, rear airbox/sidepod and introduction of modelled NACA-ducts. Fernando will continue to work on the frontwing.

Please note, that the normals on the cars haven’t been done yet, so the surfaces in the viewport look off and much to smooth. Normals will be done in a later stage together with the joint lines.

In the meantime, despite very little time at the moment, Andy is working on the helmet shape and together with Dennis, they are working on the template, to get the helmet-painting started.

McLaren WIP

Philip ‘msater’ Oakley has been working on the McLaren MP4/9 car for the last couple of weeks. He is also one of our new members working on his first model. The original McLaren was build by Marco Büttner and now receives the necessary updates to bring the model up to standards. Philip has mainly been working on the back end of the car, which includes the cockpit (needed resizing, it’s not yet finished) the engine cover, the rearwing, and the sidepods. He still need to do the rear suspension reorganization and the rest of our long todo list.

Next on the list to do is finish the cockpit resizing, reorganize the rear suspension to make it accurate, and make sure the rear of the car under the rear wing is good, along with the diffuser and the bottom of the rear wing After that, he is going to start on the nose cone and front wing.

Philip is the only one in the team using Blender 3D. We are curious how this turns out.

Here are a couple of pictures from the current state of the car. Enjoy!

Tyrell Work in Progress

Over the past few weeks Fernando Prieto has been busy reworking the Tyrell. After the reviews were done by AndreasT and myself he took over the model and working through our issue reports.

Fernando is one of our new guys and Tyrell is his first car with the team. He is very motivated and happy to show his first work in progress shots of the car. Note that these are no beauty renders and there are still a lot of things to do.

A lot of recent work wasn’t really visible and more a matter of organization and research. We hope to show more new things in the future.

Enough already :)

Seriously, we never got so much feedback on a call-for-help. We had 8 people contacting us and we are currently welcoming everyone to the team, introduce them to our infrastructure and hand out the work. We were really surprised by this number and have to work to give everyone their work packages. This will be a new wave and hopefully we have a lot to show you in the next couple of months.

At the same time as I’d like to say thanks to those who responded to our call, I’d like to quit the call-for-help now. CTDP is always looking for new members, even when we don’t say it out loud. Having so many new faces at once is very nice, but also a challenge. I don’t want to discourage anyone from contacting us, but we can’t handle more people right now. Instead I’d like to say, contact us in a couple of weeks when the dust has settled and we can say where we are at again.

Thank you for the responses,

PS: I wonder if such a call also works for track texture artists…

Head protection

We are overwhelmed! Alot more people responded to our call for help on the 1994 mod than I anticipated. Many talented and interesting people who want to know what to do next. AndreasT and I are doing extra shifts to review cars and have enough cars ready to assign.

As if he’d know we’d be posting this Call-for-modelers, David Alby Medina contacted us in the week before. He was interested in modeling for the team to improve his portfolio. After short talks, he agreed to provide the helmet we have been looking for almost 2 years.

The story story about the 1994 helmet was another one of the long ones. For the 2006 mod we had the awesome helmet model by Eugenio Faria, unfortunately he wasn’t available anymore to help us create a new helmet for 1994. Marco started a helmet, but quit half way through it. Afborro succumbed to our begging at the beginning of the year, but was cut short due to his commitment with Reiza. We were looking for external helmets, but none from that time period met our expectations. Now thanks to DAM, we have our helmet and he a great piece for his portfolio once it is finished.

This is the the helmet of Ayrton Senna, of who we happen to have the most and best reference pictures. There will be 2 more common variants of the helmet for other drivers.

Now with the helmet done, our helmet painters can finally start to work their way through the drivers list.

What was going on in March…

The past weeks have been very quiet here in the blog. This had several reasons.

As a matter of fact one was not a lack of progress. At the moment we are working on two fronts.
Andy, AndreasT and myself are reviewing the 1994-cars which have the furthest progress.
We found several huge issues on Pacific and Ligier, which we are correcting right now. At the same time we work hard to avoid the mistakes on future cars and be more thorough. Actually this is worth a lot more to talk about, but not now.

In other news, every now and then we get the question when CTDP F1-2006 version 1.2 will be released. The ultimate patch for the mod was announced a year ago fixing some remaining issues and improving tire physics. During the SLF-Game work on the patch was on hold, which caused the long postponement. Michael ‘Speed12’ Borda, and our betatesters are currently testing the patch to find the last issues.
While the patch itself is mostly maintenance and bugfixes, there will be two new exciting features, we will announce another day. 🙂

And the last reason for the lack of activity here: I took a week off, flew to Valencia and visited Raül ‘raulongo’ Gullón, fellow painter here at CTDP. This marks the 4th person from the team I met in person. It was a great little vacation. 🙂

More to come soon…

The Honda Project in 1994

Another article in the series of anecdotes and stories we find around the year 1994, while researching for the mod. We all know that Honda has a certain relationship to Formula 1 Racing, but people only know about the rise and fall of Honda F1 Racing in the last couple of years and perhaps also the phase in the 1960s when they have already been involved in Formula 1.

However, Honda has been on the verge of joining the sport more often than they actually did. In 1999, they bought a chassis from Dallara and made some first tests under the direction of Harvey Postlethwaite. Nevertheless, the project never got beyond that test drive, which was performed by Jos Verstappen, as Postlethwaite died from a heart attack. Honda instead decided to rejoin Formula 1 as engine supplier, joined BAR and you all know about the rest.

Today, though, I stumbled over the story of the Honda RC100, which was supposed to enter F1 in 1993 after Honda’s withdrawal as engine supplier. It was developed without official Honda-backing, but with acknowledged by the company. The first car was completed at the end of 1992 and was due to enter in the next season, but unfortunately, the car didn’t survive the crash test. This is why the car was evolved and they eventually did succeed to do some testing in Suzuka with Saturo Nakajima as their driver. However, he destroyed the car in the crash, so no further testing was possible.

What has this got to do with our mod? Honda still developed the car and the RC101B was ready for the first public test session at Suzuka in – you guessed it – 1994. After the test, though, Honda decided to concentrate on their CART program and it’s not known what actually happened to the car afterwards.

Now just imagine what kind of effect it would have on today’s Formula One world where one of the most important topics is whether manufacturers are good F1 or not.

Thanks to Nuppiz for bringing this story to my attention.

Sources:

Wikipedia: Honda RC100

Forix: Honda’s After-Hours project

F1Review Blog: A Honda ama a F1 e vai voltar, ô se vai

WIP Ferrari 1994 part 4

Work on Ferrari is continueing. This is one of the last cars. It was originally painted by Mike Seymour and his work was recently picked up by James ‘Juluka’ Bendy.

Actually there is a story. When we were reassigning the car both Juluka and Raül ‘Raülongo’ wanted to paint the car. Juluka described the tough negotiations this way:

After a hard bargain and exchange of goods, Raül has graceously allowed me to continue with he upscale of the red car …

I get his friend’s black and white cat, … he gets my Blackberry, I get his iPhone, … he gets my 1995 Jeep Wrangler (he has to get it across the Atlantic though) … and he gets My Chicago Blackhawks Hockey Jersey … I could not get his guitar from him …

Cheers Raül … thanks

Now for the car 🙂