Category: Cars

When modders don’t know what to do….

…then they often do things, that are completely unnecessary, perhaps stupid, and completely out of any sense ;). and exactly this happend within this case, too. Not having too much time to do the more important things like face-lifting the benetton once more, i just played around a bit. and what came out of this, you might think it is completely unnecessary and a waste of time and resources. and yes, you might be right with that. but i like it, and that’s the only thing that matters. it is like “the real deal” :D. perhaps you won’t take a notice of it ingame when racing, but you’ll always know: yes, it is there. and who knows, perhaps it will look good once ingame….definetly for all those passionated screenshot makers out there.

next time i will show you something that is more related being important….perhaps 😉

Oblique cars in multiplayer

This is about an issue that has been reported several times in very many occasions. We’d like to take the time now and talk about the problem. It has been reported, that sometimes during online races the cars begin to drive oblique. This looks very strange and obviously neither good, nore realistic.

© Maranellofan

The issue, that cars begin to lean to one side during online gaming is known, but unfortunately, that’s not an issue we are responsible for, but a bug or rather a shortcoming of rFactor.
You see our mod has one of the most advanced physics ever developed for rFactor. Our physics-guys went into great length, to use every option available to simulate the driving as realistic as possible. We are at a point, where we touch the limits and unfortunately this tilting is one sign of rFactor giving up on us.

Basically it is caused by 3 factors:

  1. the damper settings. We have the option to either use unrealistic values to workaround a graphic-bug, or keep the realistic physics and accept the bug, which is only caused sporadically. We chose the latter.
  2. the setup: It’s not really clear how, but the setup has some influence on the problem, but it doesn’t cause it.
  3. the track: The modelling-detail of the track-mesh influences how precisely rFactor can calculate the correct position of the car-model on the track. On tracks with low surface detail, low face count and large faces, the scanning looses precision and can also cause this bug.

Obviously, we are not happy about this either, we were in contact with ISI, but obviously they won’t fix it untill a possible successor of rFactor. We also can’t do the track-modelers/-converters job, to deliver good tracks, who don’t cause problems. Also, as far as we know, we are not the only modding team having this issue.
So you have the option: either accept the bug or check for damper-settings in the physics files, play with the values and find a change, which avoids the bug, but still gives you tolerable driving.

A matter of interpretation

The last few days I had a long discussion with Marco, who modelled most of the 1994 cars and also the Benetton which I’m painting.

The most difficult thing is to get good resources, good pictures. It’s no comparison to the flood of images you can get in all kinds of quality for modern F1-cars, but working with the limited sources we have is challenge. Many images are low-resolution and captures of the races are of low quality. We often resort in using 18:1 models to get at least some base for our work. So you see there is alot of room for interpretation and actually missinterpretation.

Marco was convinced, that Benetton hat different sidepods in 1994 and upgrades them during the season. The first one being quite bulky and straight and then later become slightly more curvish. He based this on his modell and what he “saw” in the pictures. I didn’t see it at all and so it took quite some time and alot of pictures to convince him of my point of view. I’m glad he is a fair chap and listens to me, even though I can be annoying with details sometimes. You see the more accurate the model, the easier it is to paint. 8)

By the way, the Benetton in the center is the old TDG Benetton from 2003. Back then it was well-crafted, but today it’s totally out of date and too undetailed. However having the archive is a big help to compare and sort out problems like this one.

So I made Marco agree with me now and it had nothing to do with the threat of physical violence or a 4 million ¥ bribe. 🙂 He’ll be reworking the sidepod for the next weeks and in February I’ll get back painting. For me this is perfect, because I’m having exams the next few weeks anyway and so I don’t get any chance to procrastinate. 🙂

Fattura del Toro Rosso

I have been asked nicely and because I liked the idea I proceeded and wrote a little Making-of for the Toro-Rosso livery. I’d like to explain a few things about the way I made it. The car got alot of my intention, because by the time I made it in late 2006 there were very few good STRs done and so I was challenged to recreate the car as authentic and as high-quality as possible. Here is the full story with full-size illustrations.

Continue reading Fattura del Toro Rosso

So back to work it is……..

As some of you may know im a huge McLaren fan so have been trying to get my hands on a mclaren to paint for CTDP for a while now, but seeing as we only did 2006 since i’ve been in the team i’ve never had the chance. but yesterday i finally got the chance to paint the classic colours of the 1994 McLaren 🙂 heres a few shots.

Continue reading So back to work it is……..

Templates & Viewer release

Ok, took a few days, but I finally finished work on the templates. This involved 3 parts:

  • The templates itself is an archive with all psd-templates for all cars (all teams + SA06 and Safetycar).
  • The viewer, which is the ISI gMotor Viewer from the SDK. We included Scene-Files for our cars, so you can preview your textures in the actual game engine.
  • Documentation about the templates and the viewer.

I order you to paint, I want to see great cars! 🙂

Picking up 1994

Now that F1 2006 is over, we are organising the next mod(s). F1 1994 has been in the tube for ages and will now get the attention it deserves. Marco has been working on if for over a year now and has made good progress reworking many shapes and painting the basic textures. These textures are outlines for the final textures in lower resolution, with missing details and now shading. The final textures beginn now and will be in 2048×2048 resolution and full baked rendershadows as we did in F1-2006. I’m painting Benetton, Mediocre will make his first steps on the Pacific and Mike is working on Ferrari. Both are new to the team and are welcomed. 🙂

Marco continue to work on new improved suspensions for several teams and is currently mapping the Ligier.

Shaun started some work on the helmets, although we have to finish the models first. He will get help by Ste and comback-guy Rob.

Raül returns with some first amazing renders of the current williams. It should be noted this is the current texture, but not the final one, so there will be improvements in the next months to come.

What about the templates?

I read just a few people asking for templates. Well to those few, templates will come. Most are pretty ready,but they where done before the betatesting so they need to get some of the bugfixes.I’ll work on it during the week to get them out as soon as possible. They have been on my personal todo list long enough. Just so you know, we didn’t forget them.

Bad news…..

Hi guys,

This time, we have some bad news for the community. We made a cool concept for our intro video, searched for music and had cool ideas. But in the past few weeks nobody had time to do it. We asked stabiz, he did some nice vids and he agreed to help us out. Then his pc crashed and now we don’t have an Intro for our mod now. We thought it would be cool to have one. So we decided to make the big package not bigger again for something 99% of you just watch 1 or 2 times. We’ll do a nice intro video with all our ideas after the release and take the time for it. It will be an extra download and can be downloaded if the user wants to have it.