WIP Lotus 1994 Part 4

Juluka continued his work on the car texture and delivered his first version.
Next step is, that I get the texture for review and make my comments and remarks for improvement. In the meantime he already continued work on the first special livery, driven by Johnny Herbert in Brazil. Upon further picture analysis we found, that a variation of this livery was driven at the Pacific GP as well. James theorized, that Lotus planed to run more special liveries throughout the following GPs, but as both cars didn’t finish in Aida the plan got scrapped and the rather decided on a constant livery change in France. Lots of livery history here. 🙂

The last one is a picture of the WIP of the Brazil-Johnny-Herbert-livery. Everybody enjoy your thanksgiving, if you life in the US like James does. 🙂

What are you doing part 2

Andy continues his magic. This car is still missing a piece, you’ll notice when you try to change to nose. Right now you’d hear the pit crew call for a new chassis, when the frontwing is broken. Back in the days they had T-cars. Another term, which modern F1-fans don’t know about and which let you feel like an old man. Enjoy the car!

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Car designations in 1994

Car designations, chassis-types are a nice way to identify the specific car of a season and it’s a nice way to have synonyms when writing about it. However, they are a pitfall, if you aren’t too deep into the background of the series you are writing about. Since I don’t have all types in my head, I try to avoid them. Even though, I don’t endorse it (hey do what you want 😉 ), articles from the devblog are quoted and sometimes wrong information are added. Please do your research or ask us before you guess what designation the car in question has.

Why do I bring it up, there were some confusions between the Lotus 107C and 109 and the Minardi M193B and M194. Both were driven in 1994, usually after the big reglement changes after spain, many teams brought B-Versions to the next races. Lotus, Sauber and Minardi did so. Ferrari also brought a major overhaul of their car in Canada. Often this was accompanied by livery changes.

Quick rule of thumb: Right now we only work on the cars with the Specifcations of the first 5 races. If we post pictures, it’s always the early spec of the car. So if you look for the official designation. Consider this please.

Deciphering the past: Minardi 1994

Unfortunately, I have picked all the backmarkers. While it’s cool to paint cars like Larrousse, Simtek and Pacific that somewhat have their own history, it can can also be very stressful because they actually needed huge amount of money. On the one hand they needed drivers like the legendarily rejectful Jean-Dénis Délétraz for Larrousse, on the other one they have had sponsors that nobody has ever heard of, therefore gone bankrupt and disappeared without a trace. But thanks to Christian and his magazine scans, I could manage to identify some no-names that were on the Minardi M193B/M194.

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WIP Lotus 1994 Part 3

The third post about Lotus is in Juluka’s own words:

Stage 3 of the progress on the upscale of the 1994 Lotus: Wow, I must say I had limited knowledge of playing with vector paths. I usually just tried to smear and smudge lines into submission, but after playing around with it a little, I think I was able to get some decent results with the lines on the car. I have all the sponsors and decals upscaled and on the car now. I still have to do the driver’s names with their country’s flags. I will attempt that tomorrow and continue to “Clean Up” the lines in the areas they are smudged or a little ragged. Thanks Dahie for the opportunity, hope it makes the grade!

WIP Lotus 1994 Part 2

Yesterday we started our little preview on the Lotus 107C. Juluka made the pictures I posted yesterday during the last week. A bit more recent – as in yesterday – are the images below. They already show most of the logos, but there are a few areas and decals, which will need some attention.

Juluka, as most of our painters uses Vector-paths to create the smooth lines on the car. It takes some time to get used to them, when you use it the first time. You don’t paint anymore, but you form curves and these filled curves are as smooth as they can get and scale, if we ever need to increase the resolution again. It’s also much easier to fit the lines across mapping seams. Usually when you have the side of an object and the top of the object, they both areas are mapped independently and you have to fit the lines to smoothly cross the resulting edge. With paths this fiddle-work can be done much quicker.

I’ll post more pictures when I get them. 🙂

WIP Lotus 1994 Part 1

One of the remaining 3 cars, which didn’t receive their final texture yet was Lotus. Actually in 1994 Lotus ran with at least three distinct liveries. This is the early season livery of the first  4 GPs. Later in the season they started with a different design and at the first GP in Brazil Johny Herbert drove a unique Lotus-Livery.

James ‘Juluka’ Bendy is with the team for some time. He was working on some of our tracks and helped out on many occasions. When we were asking who wanted to help with the last remaining cars, he raised his hands and took the job. The first previews are promising and I can’t await the first textures. 🙂

More screens will follow in the next few days.

James ‘Juluka’ Bendy

Status of F1-1994

Work has been progressing quite good on the F1 1994 mod. After finishing his stint on the Cylon, Andy picked up the Pacific and is reworking the car to bring it ingame, He’ll try out a few new techniques and smoothen the car. Hopefully there is some new stuff to show you soon, more than just the model-previews we had so far.

So far there were 3 teams, whose textures haven’t been touched at all. Jordan, Footwork and Lotus haven’t been assigned to anyone until last week. So far we only had the low-resolution dummy texture Marco did last year. I began work on upscaling the Footwork texture. I found an issues, which forced some remapping, so I have no screenshots of the progress at the moment. Daniel ‘Codan’ Fredrich signed for the Jordan car, but there is nothing to show yet either. Lotus was taken by James ‘Juluka’ Bendy. He actually specializes on track textures, but asked for a chance to be involved in car textures and this was perfect, but more on this later.

We welcome Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner to the physics team for 1994. He worked together with Andy on the Cylon and we could convince him to join in with 1994. The work on the physics hasn’t actively started yet, but he is currently collecting research material.

At this point I’d like to thank Christian, who contacted us a few weeks ago. He had a subscription of the Italian F1-Magazin “Auto Sprint” from the year 1994, which he began to scan for us. This is very helpful for technical data as well as photos. The amount of data you find on the internet is limited, so the more printed sources we can get the better. So if you have similar subscriptions about F1 in 1994, don’t hesitate to contact us. We are also all ear about book suggestions.

Destiny struck on the weekend, when our Subversion server died. We use Subversion to version-control all our source files, which is a great way to keep everyone in the team on the same page and have backups. From what we can tell, we have no dataloss, except the history of the past 2 years, all the latest and uptodate data are save and secure. We are currently setting up and configuring a replacement so work can continue without much break.

So much about the status of the mod. Next post will have some pictures again. 😉