James ‘Juluka’ Bendy continues his work on the 1994 helmets of Rubens Barrichello and Pedro Lamy. Infact I have to post these fast, because he is quicker giving wip-shots than I can post them. *gg*
Andreas ‘Neidryder’ Neidhardt was just showing around some WIP shots of the 1994 Jordan, when we realized, we never posted any shots of the current car here in the blog. This needs to change.
The car was original modelled by Marco ‘BMWFan’ Büttner and is one of those we decided to keep and build upon. After some thorough reviews Neidryder took over to update the model and bring it up to standards. This involved heavy work on the main chassis: proportions, airbox and rear end. The latter is still work in progress as you can see in one of the shots. The suspensions are also just placeholders and will be replaced in the upcoming weeks. Lastly, the joint lines will be added to the model.
Once the model is done it will receive an updated mapping and one of the painters (maybe even myself) will update the existing textures to the model.
With this post we will start a new blog series called “inside F1 1994”. This blog series will show you some interesting technical aspects of the formula one season of 1994.
Today in inside F1 1994, we want to shone some light on the early season suspension using the brand new modeled Ferrari 412T1 from our modeler Erale.
As with most cars running a high nose, the lower front wishbones locate on to a central point to tidy up the under-nose airflow. Hower, unlike other system which are attached using a pair of closely-positioned uni-ball joings, 
Ferrari designer John Barnard actually links the wishbones using a male/female joint on the knife-edges, reaping the benefits of increased stiffness. The drawing also shows how Barnard has been able to locate the master cylinders inside the chassis bulkhead, by already working to the 1995 regulations. Ferrari also ran a third front suspension configuration at Imola with the secondary dampers encased in a metal cradle. Again, increased stiffness appears to be the main benefit, along with more predictable damper movement.
Trying to reproduce the 1994 cars as close as possible we tried to recreate the suspension, a very significant part of the model, as good as possible according to our reference pictures/drawings. We have a thread in our internal forum to show progress and discuss upcoming issues or a lack of references.
Erale made a few screenshots in 3ds Max and Andreas T made comparison pictures to show what erale modeled accurate and what needs to be changed.
Here is the final outcome:
The accuracy of the suspension is not only important for the model, but also for the simulation of the suspension geometry in rFactors physics.
Time for some new WIP shots. Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner has been busy building the new Ferrari model. The model has been in development over the past 3 months. After our extensive reviews we deemed the existing Ferrari model not accurate. Updating the as we do with other models became more time-consuming than building a clean new model from scratch. After all we have all models, measurements and as it is important to get the proportions right, this was the way to go. The basic model is finished, erale is currently working on the details, joint lines and suspension.
More screens will be on the way soon.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
It was pretty quiet in the last few weeks. We were working on the Ligier and we’re facing a new challenge. That is we need more hands than we have right now.
So CTDP in general has a problem. While we developed our workflow over the years, we found ways to cope with the big amount of work in our mods and to organize this work. The mods can not be done without good organization.
Still all our infrastructure doesn’t help us with the issue the team is currently facing.
Considering the size of our mods and that CTDP is a project done only in free time, it often surprises people that we only have a core team of less than 10 people. 2 Modeler, 3-4 painters and 2 physics guys, 1-2 programmers and a beta tester. Many of them have been in the team for more than 5 years or even from the beginning. Additionally we used to have many people who join the team to help and we have sort-of freelancers, who help, but didn’t join. No problem, there is space for everyone. This is how CTDP has always worked in the past 9 years.
Working on projects like ours often takes a long time. Modding has become very professional and for several members it has been there head start into business. Keeping the motivation is very important and so is finding new members.
The work on the 2006 mod was a drag for many people and we were happy when we finished it back in late 2008. Unfortunately working on new projects – 1994 and 2009 – did not bring alot of new energy as we had hoped.
Right now we are in the situation that we need new blood. We are working hard on 1994, but we need new manpower to help with the work, we need more hands. The mod will not have the same amount of content as the 2006, but it is a challenge for other reasons. The lack of good reference material requires us to perform very thorough car reviews and these reviews leave more work, than Andy alone can handle.
Who do we need? First and foremost we need dedicated and motivated people who are interested in season 1994. We need new modelers in Maya and/or 3D Studio Max, not necessarily with knowledge about rFactor-export, but sure it would not hurt. We need people who know TYPOlight/Contao and want to help with our websites. We need Java-Programmers who want to help with the continued development of the DDS-Utils and rfDynHUD. We need people who can continue work and don’t start everything from scratch. We need people who communicate (team language is English) and are critical towards their work and the work of their teammates. We need people who are willing to help and are disciplined to finish their work. And if one or more conditions describe you, then WE NEED YOU!
Nevertheless on the brighter side, there were also progress in the last few weeks. As I said above we worked on Ligier. 6e66o was so kind to take the car out for a ride in Montreal and made some shots. Thanks for that! The helmet shape is still temporary but one of our new members, David Alby Medina already started to work on a proper replacement 🙂
