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.

Dress

It’s been more than 4 years since our last big redesign of our website. All of the team loved the gritty-used paper look and it took quite some convincing to move to something new hopefully equally likable, while at the same time practical website. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as we. Right now there are no new contents, hopefully this will change soon. 🙂

Also we opened up a flattr-account, but more about this some other time.

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!

Final Ferrari 1994 model

With some touchups by Neidryder, we finished work on the Ferrari model. The model was done by Stefan ‘erale’ Triefellner in the past months and is now ready for mapping and then painting. Painting will be done by James ‘juluka’ Bendy and erale will continue on the next model.

Andy took a few pictures of the car to show offaround erale’s work.

Call for Collaboration: Museums

An important part for building mods is research and we spent a lot of time to collect pictures, technical manuals and other resources to simulate the Mods as realistic as possible.
When we embarked on the 1994 mod, we knew, we wouldn’t have the same access to high-resolution material as we did for 2006, but over the years we collected over 3GB of photo material from the season. Still, every now and then we wondered what happened to the old cars from 1994 and where they ended up. Our research found some of them in Museums around the world, but for many cars we did not find any information. This brought us the idea to crowdsource this search.
We’d like to know which museums around the world have any Formula One cars. I’m sure this is very useful information for other Modders as well, which is why we invite anyone to join in on the research and help to collect a complete list of museums and their exhibited cars.

For this purpose we set up an Etherpad and started to collect and discuss car models and museums.

List of Formula-One models in museums

Etherpad is a javascript-based collaborative tool for parallel writing. Once you enter, you can change your name in the top-right corner, or you can write anonymously. You see anyones writing in a different color and you can just come in and help writing. Every change is saved automatically, so vandalism can be traced.

Once we feel we have a complete list, we may republish this here on the devblog, so everyone benefits from the research.

In a second step, we are also looking for people who’d like to go to a few museums and take pictures of selected cars. If you have a museum near you and would like to help out, contact us.

Getting started to … Model

Every now and then we get a request of people to join CTDP with the aim to learn X. Be it modeling, textures or any other skills related to Modding. Today we’d like to give a few hints where to get started with the endeavor to learn 3D-modeling.

How do I start?

It’s a rather long way before you can start to model a complex shape like a F1 car. So the first steps would be to learn how to set up blueprints for a car. There are a lot of tutorials available that deal with these topics. They guide you through the whole process from setting up the blueprints over the modeling and basic techniques used till you have finished your first car. These tutorials focus on cars with pretty simple shapes as it doesn’t make sense to learn modeling by recreating a pre-2009 Formula One car with its complex shape and all that winglets.

These are some Tutorials we can recommend to start off.

What’s next?

After you finished your first model try another car. Try some harder shapes but still use accurate blueprints which are a good aid in the beginning. Focus on getting a smooth shape and try to find your own modeling style. Don’t copy other people that created these tutorials. That won’t help you if you try to model a Formula One car or some other car where you don’t have any blueprints and of course tutorials.

Speaking of modeling Formula One cars (or other racing cars). The most important step before starting a racing car without a blueprint is research. As you don’t have any blueprints – and if you have you can’t be sure how accurate they are – you have to get the proportions right. So take a look at the technical regulations. The tell you a let about the cars measurement. They can tell you the size of a cockpit opening or the position and size of the rear wing. Also try to find good sideview pictures of your car to use that as a ‘blueprint’.

By looking at these tutorials you’ll find that some start with a simple polygon (quad) and others start with a box. Don’t hang on that too much. That’s more a personal preference which suits your style. In the end you’ll be working with polygons. And always aim to use quads. If you have to use triangles but never let a face have more than four vertices.

There are also some techniques that use spline-modeling or maybe patch-modeling. But in our opinion that are more advanced modeling techniques and not suited for beginners. If you’re pretty secure with the polymodeling and you found your own style you can start to experiment with these techniques. I find them very useful – especially the patches – if you want to recreate complex forms without spending much time. Through the splines you have a rather easy but still a very accurate way to control the form of your patch.

Which 3D modeling tool?

There are many 3d modeling tools out there. Maybe some of you know “the big 3”, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3d Studio Max & Autodesk XSI (former Softimage XSI). But there are a lot of cheaper (Maxon Cinema 4D & Luxology Modo) and some open source (for example Blender) softwares available.

Which one is the right one for your first modeling attempt?
Well let me tell you one thing: it’s just a matter of taste. If you know how to model in one application you can adapt all your skills pretty fast to another one. Sure you have special features in some of these tools but the basics are all the same.
Most modders start with 3D Studio Max because it’s quite popular within the game industry. Maya is also a good choice to start. Nevertheless is the learning curve with the node based User Interface and the Hotbox pretty tough. Softimage XSI looks weird if you start it the first time but it’s very handy for organic and “freestyle” modeling. Cinema 4D is most used in the architectural industry but still some of the modders (for example spoony from LMT) are using it to model F1 cars. Modo is a very cool tool, too. It has a great performance in modeling and useful tools but it’s not that popular and therefore you won’t find many tutorials for it. Blender will be adressed by msater at a later time.

You see, each application has its advantage, but 80% of the tutorials out there are covering 3D Studio Max. That’s why you should start with this application (if available). After your first few cars you can try to do parts or the whole car of your next project in a different program to get an overview. Most of the 3D modelers in game or CG industry have basic knowledge in more than three 3D applications. The get a specialist you need to know the basics of each program and pick the one which fits best to your expertise and personal taste.

We take questions! If you are stuck with a problem or have questions related to modeling ask them and we will adress them in a future post here on the blog.

Thanks to TwoOneOne for some of the tutorials links.