Wednesday 29 May 2019

GP4: 1996 Ferrari F310 walkaround part 3

For the third part of the walkaround, I will be looking at the cockpit, the rear of the car, and some of the internal parts of the 1996 Ferrari F310 created by Nick Ovey and Ebi Attard. If you missed the first two parts, you can read them here, part 1 and part 2.


The cockpit is pretty basic, at a time in GP4 when there wasn't really much attention put into making cockpits accurate, as the in cockpit view used a generic model for all cars. Some nice touches are the onboard camera, as placing the camera on top of the rollover bar started to become the norm in 1996.


The wireframe is shown on the shot above, so that you can compare some of the techniques used on this car compared to some of my cars of a later period. The same philosophy applies with more polygon usage around curved regions, whilst large polygons are used for flat surfaces.

The Ferrari were one of the teams caught out with the side head-rest protection regulation, new for 1996. They had the highest of all the teams, something that affected the flow to the airbox above the drivers head, and it was common to see Schumacher and Irvine to drive down the straights with their head as over to the side as they could manage.



Moving onto the rear of the car and this is an area where perhaps artistic license ruled over accuracy, though it is not bad by any means.


There have been some lovely photos of the car with its engine cover off, so it was good to see that faithfully recreated on this car. whilst it is basic and a lot of it covered by the radiators, it's good enough for you to get an idea of what is there. Ferrari were quite unique in that they didn't run a black airbox, with the prancing horse featuring prominently on it.


Here is a shot of the inside of the car from the rear. For comparison, I have a screenshot of the F310 created for F1 2013. It's a shame that the car doesn't make it into the classic part of the 2018/19 game.


As you can see, the 2013 model uses many more polygons and attempts far more detail but the proportions are pretty similar. What I'm saying is that though the GP4 car, created by amateurs and aiming for less detail, have done a fantastic job and holds up well against the F1 2013 version which was created by professionals with probably better source material to work from.