IFM 2009 – Page 2 – CTDP Development Blog

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.

IFM 2009 : Revised helmet model

Today we want to present you the helmet model of our IFM 2009 mod. It was originally created by Eugenio Faria and was part of our F1 2006 Mod as well as the F1 2007 BMW F1 car we created for ISI as an add on for rFactor 1.

So this helmet has quite a history. Back then in 2006/2007 it was top notch quality. But for our current project we revised the model to bring it up to our current quality standards. The result can be seen below. We will post another blogpost with an interactive comparison as soon as (CTDP)Dahie is back from his well deserved holiday.

IFM 2009 : First liveries

In this blogpost we will show you some progress we made on the liveries. James and Dennis did a great job on the Jenzer and JD designs. As the liveries aren’t exactly the same like in Formula One most teams share at least a basic design. They also had to recreate most sponsor logos from hand as in IFM a lot of rather unknown companies were involved.

Also most of 3D work is finished. We’re currently making some minor tweaks here and there and are working on the LOD objects. So stay tuned for more IFM news in the near future.

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.

Introducing: IFM – International Formula Master 2009

First of all, let us introduce you to a our latest project a little bit.

IFM – what is it?

The International Formula Master (IFM) was the successor of the F3000 International Masters series. It was held as a supporting series during the European WTCC races from 2007 till 2009. The series was a junior Formula series which was thought as a stepping stone into the GP2 just like the Formula 3 Euro Series. The cars were manufactured by Italian based company Tatuus and were comparable to smaller single seaters like the Formula 3 cars. But they looked more like a small version of a pre-2009 Formula 1 car.

The series was thought to run at least 3 more years, but FIA launched their own junior formula series in 2009 (Formula Two) and many teams and drivers left.

Why are we doing this mod?

With rFactor 2 coming up with lots of new features, we needed a “small” mod to test out all the new things and every aspect especially of the new packaging. The car was made by Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner back in 2009. The 2008 version was finished pretty quickly, but as the car always was supposed to be a rFactor 2 mod work was stopped eventually. With the upcoming rFactor 2 release it was clear that the mod would be picked up again so he gave it a small touch up and brought the car to its 2009 spec and we started to experiment doing new shaders, materials and testing out all rF2 related features. Within the upcoming weeks we want to show you in a devblog series our progress, maybe a few experiments with new material settings and so on.

What about the release?

Our current plan is to create a few liveries and helmets and release the full grid with placeholder cars together with templates. This way the community can create the missing or even own liveries/helmets and we don’t want to invest more time than needed for IFM and focus on F1 1994 (which is still our main priority for rF2) instead.

Here is a small teaser picture for our blog readers :).