GP4: McLaren MP4/19B - Monza spec update

Back in 2004, GP4 was blessed to have many more modders and there were at least two versions of every car, and plenty of people to make track specific updates. One that was missed was the Monza specific car of the McLaren MP4/19. 

This is the car made by Wai who was a leading modeler at the time, and the early season car was painted by Bojan, again another leading painter in the community. McLaren heavily updated their car mid-season, and the B spec version of the car was updated by Wai, and the textures updated by another talented painter Ross Hunter, who I was working with on various things at the time.

One thing I love creating are noses and wings, I don't know why, but they're quite quick for me to do, so with a few hours free one evening, I was able to do a quick update. 

So the nose is done from scratch, but I had to keep the same low poly structure, otherwise it would look completely out of place. The wings themselves I could be a little more liberal with the polygon usage, but I ended up keeping it a fairly low poly philosophy.

The wider nose would be adopted permanently for the 2005 car, but it only appeared once in 2004. The tip of the nose is quite round on the top surface, transitioning to a flat surface when the nose cone joins the monocoque. Although it's not immediately obvious, but I have added the hole on the tip of the nose. The front wing supports were quite tricky to get right, as it's angled in many ways, and it took a few attempts to get it right, particularly as there were not a huge amount of photos to go off.

The only thing I have not really had time to get right was the blending of the normals. Wai used to use a technique with low poly normals, where as I would do an extra row of polygons to rectify today. Basically, he would create the nose shape, but he would delete the joining row of polygons, so that you're left with a flat row on the top of the nose, and flat row on the side of the nose. He would calculate the normals and then join the rows without re-calculating the normals. Because my nose adds an additional row to get the curvature (and time) I haven't put that last bit of effort into blend the normals with the monocoque.

The low downforce rear wing was quite straight forward, there were no curves to worry about, so that was quite quick and easy to do.

The car is mapped, but I've not done anything to amend the textures, but you can download the shape on this link: