GP4: 1994 Ferrari 412T1B

1994 is the season I fell in love with F1, and with so many changes throughout the season, the 2nd half of the year almost deserves its own mod. Changes include simpler front wings, raised floor and plank, simpler diffusers and holes cut in the engine cover. GP4 has a pretty decent mod for the first four Grand Prix of the year, and has been converted into other games since. But the cars from the second half of the year were never developed. So, I started out work on my favourite car of the year, the Ferrari 412T1B. 

Personally, this is my first car in 6 years, so I had to relearn the skills I had in the past, as well as looking and learning from recent models. My aim is add detail where I can but never to detract from being able to play it in a game, so that means being economical on polygon counts. This car has just under 35,000 faces in total. 

Technical walk around

These screenshots were taken of the car before it was fully completed, partly on the 3d model and a very early version of the textures. This car is based on the Australian Grand Prix version and how it ran in the race - they tried a different rear wing in practice. 

The front wing end plates became much more basic, due to the ban on bodywork around the front wheels, but they did grow taller than before. The Ferrari started the season with a curved trailing edge and the front wing tapered forwards on each side, but for the 412T1B, they went for a much simpler arrangement. The Ferrari had a few bumps on the monocoque to house the suspension, and they seem to enjoy putting body lines through them - not very easy to model!

Ferrari went for a more conventional sidepod for the 412T1B, but you'll notice a bulge around the side of the cockpit, remnants of the previous rounded sidepod with the teardrop inlet. This is basically to house the driver in the cockpit. I can only guess that they had issues with the boundary layer detaching around this bulge, so they introduced barge-boards, initially 2 and then 4 from Portugal to the end of the season, as well as to manage the flow to the new sidepods and the wake from the front tyres.

I've put a bit more effort into the cockpit and dashboard than previously, and thanks to lots of pictures from recent demos, I'm quite happy with the outcome.

I started working on a slightly more complicated driver body on my 93 Tyrrell and 96 Footwork, to go along with 3D belts. However this will be the first released model with it.

The rear of the sidepods are quite different from the early season 412T1, with the lower part making the most of the coke-bottle shape to feed the diffuser, whilst there was an increased surface area along the top, presumably to create more downforce from the shape of the sidepods. Housing the rear suspension was interesting, they had a bulge there from the early season car, but because of the increased surface area of the sidepod, they had to cut a hole in it where you can see the suspension through it.

With all that work on the sidepod, they managed to make the back of the engine cover quite low, allowing them to curve the ends of the lower rear wing downwards (similar concept to the Newey's Williams). With the simpler diffuser design, the curvier sidepods and the lower rear wing all work together to recover some of the lost read downforce from the mid-season rule changes.

I haven't bothered with a complicated damage model, I wasn't too happy with the flickering of the airbox in-game. But I couldn't resist putting some detail in on top of the gearbox, and you can see what is underneath some of those bulges on rear of the engine cover. One of the carry-overs from the 412T1 was that they put a housing around the sides of the gearbox to hide the suspension mounting points, which made my job a bit easier.

I hope you enjoyed the walk through of the car.

Download Link:

The finished car is available to download from here: Download Link

My thanks to Kedy89 (Tobi) for finishing off my work on the textures and to AUS_Doug for his part in the textures too.

For my part, it is free to download and use, and if you want to convert it to another game, let me know, but it is free to use, just remember those involved in its creation.

You can find my Ferrari 412T1B 1/43 model review as well as my summary of Ferrari's 1994 season here: Model Review