More from the vaults

Over the past 3 years we have continously added cars from our mods to our Sketchfab account. The older the mod, the harder it is to convert the cars as many tools from that era only work with many workarounds. However, we continue to add more cars from the F1 2005 and F1 2004 mod.

F1 2005 by CTDP by Cars & Tracks Development Project on Sketchfab

F1 2004 by CTDP by Cars & Tracks Development Project on Sketchfab

We decided last year to leave X/Twitter as we don’t want to be associated with a platform hosting Nazis. We are going to post any small updates worth mentioning Mastodon account instead.

First IFM 2009 ingame shots

You’ve waited long enough, today we’ll show you the first ingame pictures of the IFM 2009 in rFactor 2. The car was already in the game for some time but as we mentioned in the “Mirror, Mirror” post we had to deal with some normal issues first. In the last few days we brought our new tire textures by erale ingame and also replaced the bolts that were previously painted on the liveries with texture planes. The advantage of this solution is a much more detailed texture.

The livery on the car is one of the Jenzer Motorsport cars driven by Pal Varhaug and was painted by juluka.

There is still much work to do but we’re on track. Stay tuned for more ingame pictures in the near future and some making-of tutorials.

Mirror, Mirror

Why there haven't been ingame shots of the IFM model

During the development of the IFM mod for rFactor2 we stumbled upon a problem that looked like some messed up normals on a few places of the car. So we looked again at the car and its normals. Re-smoothened them over and over again and still got this nasty normals on the car. We were clueless what could cause the problem. Then we noticed that those normal issues only appeared on one half of the car and together with the fact, that we didn't have this issue with the unmapped model we came to the conclusion, that something on our mapping has to cause these normals issues.

CTDP maps its cars differently to most or all(?) other modders out there. For the 2006 mod there were three textures: one for the top of the car, one for the right and one for the left side of the car. Right and left had exactly the same mapping which has the following reason: While painting the design of a car you don't have to adjust it for the opposing side of the car. You just copy it over and mirror the sponsor logos and save memory as both drivers share the same textures. Ingame everyhting looks like it should and it saved our painters a lot of time.

We did the same style we used for 2006 with 1994. Just for IFM we experimented with a slightly different approach. We now have 2 instead of 3 textures for the car. Left and right aren't seperated textures anymore. They're both distributed over these 2 textures. But still one side is mirrored for easier painting so that our painters just have to move their design up/down and mirror the sponsor logos.

Continue reading Mirror, Mirror

IFM 2009: Before and after…

We introduced you briefly to our International Formula Master mod for rFactor2. As we mentioned the model was originally build in 2009 and we'd like to show you a comparison with of the original model with the one we will use in the mod.
In these shots you can spot the differences between the two models. One of them was made in the year 2009 and features the 2008 spec of the car. The other was overhauled 2012 and features the 2009 spec of the car. The differences in the spec include a pretty big fin on the engine cover, new endplates for the rear wing and brake ducts on the front and rear. Other adjustments were fixing normal issues on the whole car and updating the modeled joint lines on the body to CTDP standards we developed during our F1 1994 modeling.

Continue reading IFM 2009: Before and after…

Inside F1 1994: Measuring Williams

We welcome Radu Teo, a new modeler who has started to work on the new Williams model. The first preview we have for you is a bit different than usual. Over the years we did alot of research on the cars to get as many technical data as possible. This also involves blueprints (if possible, usually impossible), specifications and measurements. Very often we find contradictory sources and especially the wheelbase is something of regular debate for many cars. Williams is another prime example, as we have found 3 different measurements for the wheelbase: 2990mm / 2950mm / 2890 mm
Radu did among others the attached photo comparison to find the correct wheelbase. The picture gives 2.84m,which is shorter than any of our sources. Unless we find something canon and concluding, we will probably opt for a compromise of 2.89m.

Edit: And another one.

Jordan 1994 WIP

While Stefan is working on Larrousse, Andreas ‘Neidryder’ Neidhardt continued to work on the Jordan. The basic shape of the car is done and we are tweaking details on the carbody. However the suspensions you see are still placeholders and will be replaced this weekend.

In other news, James Bendy finished work on the Ferrari textures for now. He’ll paint the Jordan next. Larrousse will be painted by Dennis ‘mediocre’ Schmidt.

Larrousse 1994 WIP – an ontological paradox

Fabian was right, the car in the last post was the Larrousse 1994. A totally unremarkable car and the only thing worth noting is, that it drove with 2 very distinct liveries in the first 4 races, which Dennis ‘mediocre’ Schmidt is going to paint later.

Today erale frightened me. He said he had finished the model for Larrouse. I didn’t believe him, since Ferrari took several month to finish and you just don’t build cars in 3 days anymore. He said his time machine finally worked and he traveled into the future to take the final model back to the present. Now, what bothers me are two things: first, why didn’t he go to even further into the future to bring back a mapped model (erale claims he had only Plutonium for one trip, but we all know Mr Fusion will be available for domestic use within 4 years!) and secondly, assuming erale never deletes the model by accident and keeps the file till the end, who actually build the model? And if it has mistakes, can I blame the universe?

Anyway, erale got so scared by this onthological paradox, that he deleted the model to build it himself. Here are the surviving photos of the future finished car. Hope posting this doesn’t rip open the space-time-continuum, AGAIN!