This is a short one as I’m still during my exams (next one in 2 hours). Marco doesn’t give me the chance to post WIPs of his work very often, but as every car is pretty much done by him anyway, that’s fine. Here is a small WIP-shot of Ferrari who just got modeled grills on the sidepod. Ferrari is one of the last cars, that are being worked on, most others are stuck in review quere, which is on hold as long as I have to learn Math.
Last chance to take a look at the Ligier before the car goes ingame. Andy has been working, among other things on the details of the Ligier. Since the last WIP-shot all jointlines and holes have been added to the car. Note the fully modeled engine, which can be spotted through the cooling of the sidepod. The textures still sport some of the guides I lay out for Andy to make some positioning easier for him. One example is the fuel-opening.
Next station will be ingame.
Small status update. I get lost in my exams the next few weeks while Andy continues preparing cars for ingame.
Andy worked on Ligier last week and worked on some changes as we reported. These changes required some texture updates to continue. As I’m a bit out of the picture at the moment these changes are postponed for 1-2 weeks. In the meantime Andy picked up Jordan, which I reviewed and cleared last week.
Andy’s procedure is roughly this: He gets the models, which were done by Marco in zModeler and ports them to Maya, where he reworks all necessary parts to optimize the car for rFactor. This includes smoothing some edges and reworking all normals to improve the surface lighting on the cars. This is very important to get proper lighting and especially reflections on the car ingame later.
Here is a small animation showing the differences in the model before and after his tweaks. Often this requires some small remapping afterwards, this hasn’t been done yet and will follow the next few days.
This is the raw car so far without any joint lines, more work for Andy. 🙂
James ‘Juluka’ Bendy has been busy on the Footwork. He is identifying the trackversions for the first couple of GPs and is doing everything he can to get the squares right. James in his own words:
Here is the Monaco Livery. Note the changes in the matrix designs on the upper side pods of the car … those guys must have had alot of time on their hands to change squares all the time. I am beginning to refer to this car as my son calls it, the confetti car… 🙂
So here is a shot of the Monaco version:
Once the car is ready on James’ part, it’ll go the usual process of getting into my hands for review and Andy’s hands for going ingame.
I mentioned in the last post, there has been some discussion last weekend over what car will be put ingame next. McLaren was the first candidate, but it didn’t make my eagle-eye inspection. Lotus, although nearly done is getting some more attention and therefore wasn’t our next choice. Ligier was, as it features a simple livery and little to do in this regard. However as I was doing my reviews I noticed some proportion issues. I simply can’t let such things go and so I begged first Marco then Andy to address the issue. I can be a maniac with such things and I admire everyone who can work with me. 🙂
Andy was so kind and took the job, as he needed to update a few things anyway to bring the car to all it’s glory.
Here is a small gimick, a comparison animation between the car before and after the proportion update. the old car had some normal issues, the surface on the new version is much smoother. You can notice the slightly pointier nose as well. Most obvious is the longer sidepod, which begins more than 15cm closer to the front tires, as it did before. The rear sidepod was also changed slightly as some angles were too steep and are smoother now.
Andy concluded most of the work on the carbody. Next up are the jointlines between all bodywork panels on the carsurface. The textures are mostly done, but will get a small update to compensate for the mapping changes.
Yesterday we hit a small wall, as Pacific was ingame and we had to decide which car was to go ingame next. As I’m busy with my semester end I needed to do some catching up on my work reviewing the cars we got finished. Finished most often means Marco did his work on the model and somebody painted a set of textures. This may look ready, but it proved to be good practice to have an eye on it before sending it ingame. This is the last chance to remove the biggest issues and so we try to catch them. Now yesterday, we didn’t have a car readily reviewed and so I spent my day working on Ligier, identifiying some issues and tweaking some stuff on the textures. Today I spent half my day doing the same on Jordan.
Jordan was modeled by Marco Büttner and he also painted the initial textures in 1024×1024. The textures were upscaled by Daniel ‘Codan’ Fredrich.The textures aren’t finished yet, as some logos need improving and the colors stand for debate.
While Ligier had some proportion issues, which Andy will address when putting the car ingame, Jordan was a clean shape without issues. Great work on this one. Marco!
Here is a comparison between the very first and the very latest texture version.
The first little big moment for the F1-1994 mod came this weekend.
Andy exported the Pacific model to rFactor and we got the first look at the car ingame. The result is promising, but not yet beautiful. The helmet is a dummy by Eugenio Faria. The driver body is also a dummy for now, as afborro planed to update his animated driver body. The tyre and rim models are pretty much final, but the textures are not. And lastly the textures on the Pacific car lack any optimization. They got their rendered shadows, but no alpha or specular map tweaking. Also the base-color for the silver car surface is not yet done. This will be the next step and Mediocre is looking into the topic, as I am busy right now with work.
Enough Disclaimer, first proper ingame shots of F1-1994:
During our work on the 1994 mod, there are always new things you can learn. Apart from new experiences on the technical side like modelling joint lines, you also learn a lot about the season itself and the teams and drivers involved. Today, Dahie was told a story about the Pacific Grand Prix team, that seems to be quite a weird coincidence. It took place during the San Marino Grand Prix but as the deaths of Ratzenberger and later Senna dominated the headlines, hardly anyone has ever heard of it.
As 1994 was a time when the Formula 1 was not as professional as it is nowadays, the small teams such as Minardi, Simtek and Pacific were desperately looking for sponsorship money which resulted in different liveries from race to race, which you can see in this post concerning the Simtek team.
For the race in Imola, Pacific Grand Prix has persuaded a cigarette company called “Black Death” to sponsor the team. Their logo featured a skull and apparently a crossbone, which cannot be seen here though.
As the stickers for the cars didn’t arrive in time, the Pacific team ran the cars without the new sponsor on Saturday, when Roland Ratzenberger died. However, they seem to have arrived later that day and were ready to be put on the racing cars but for obvious reasons, the Pacific team declined that offer by now. “It’s actually a very difficult situation.” explained Pacific’s Graeme Glew. “The backing could be a saviour, but obviously it would have been inappropriate here.”
The “Black Death” company never appeared in Formula 1 after this incident. Quite an ironic story, isn’t it?
Thanks to Felix Schönhofen who brought this story to our interest.
Sources: The AUTOSPORT Bulletin Board and Rally Racing Nr 6 June 1994
Andreas ‘Neidryder’ Neidhard spent the last few weeks finalizing the Pacific car. The original model was done by Marco ‘BMWFan’ Büttner and the textures were painted by Dennis ‘Mediocre’ Schmidt. Andy took over to convert the model for rFactor and add his magic. The magic being 3D modeled joint lines on the car body. This is the first time we do this, so far all joint lines were always done using textures and normal-maps. Modeling them in 3D gives much more depth and makes them sharper ingame. This comes to a price. Of course the face count increases and is not up to the same count we use for the F1-2006 mod. As the cars are much less detailed as the 2006 cars, we can spent the extra polies and these details without regrets. Pacific checks out with 27k faces.
Here are two work in progress shots within Max from this morning. (Andy did some night shifts…) One showing the full car, second one without body work. The tyre textures are dummies for now, they will be improved later. Enjoy!
James ‘Juluka’ Bendy continued working on the Footwork, you can see some preview below. I in return gave my comments about the Lotus and James already fixed many of my noted issues. Andy spent last weekend on the pacific. Stefan aka Erale began work on a new helmet model. We have been missing a good one, which is why there are no helmets for the mod yet. Hopefully this branch of work can beginn soon.
