GP4: 1995 Ferrari 412T2

When I started out making cars for the 1995 mod, I was simply looking to bring some simple updates to the existing CTDP cars that were very basic. So the cars towards the rear end of the field were pretty much an updated version of the CTDP cars, whilst a few of the cars near the front of the grid were created from scratch.

The Ferrari that I shaped for the 1995 mod for GP4 was one of the first scratch cars I ever made, and admittedly it wasn't great. It bore a reasonable enough resemblance, but I had no modelling experience other than starting out with somebody else's car and moving things around and took it from there. Tony took the car to map and he almost remodelled it to make the polygons line up and the normals look much better. One of the things he took out were the diamond shaped vents on the top of the sidepods. If I remember correctly, the car was painted by Ross Hunter.

Anyway, the car has existed a long time and has been converted into other games.

I've been playing the mobile game called Real Racing 3 for a few years now and when I saw this car pop up, I just had to buy it - it was one of my first really fast cars in my garage. Thanks to the guys at gamemodels.ru I was able to have a look at the model in Zmodeler.

The car itself is quite a low poly shape, these cars are supposed to run on mobile devices. The car is pretty accurate, with nice detail in the cockpit and the rear suspension area. It does miss some rear winglets, the front wing is a bit strange and it is missing the bargeboards, but by and large this is a nice car and easily convertable into GP4 without too much editing or scaling.

The car was also featured in F1 2017 of the Codemasters range and subsequent releases. The car is a high-poly work of art and GP4 would not be able to handle the polygon count if you were to put it straight into the game. Having said that, I have noticed a few bits that I think could be improved, but I'll mention them in subsequent posts.

So it got me thinking, can I use these two cars as references and update my car or rather recreate it from scratch. The time consuming thing with my 1994 cars is that I'm trying to put lots of detail in there. For this I needed to step back a little bit and do a simpler car, we'll call it the 412T2 Lite for GP4. So I aim to use a similar polygon structure and level of detail on the chassis and rear end from the low-poly RR3 car, and then use the Codies car for reference for wings, suspension and bargeboards.

Having done a very similar cockpit for the 1994 412T1, I aim to add some detail into the cockpit so that the onboard shots will look nice.

RR3

F1 2017