GP4: 1994 Williams FW16B Renault WIP update 6

I was looking back and I can't believe it's been a year to the day since my last update on this Williams. Well with a couple of smaller tweaks, I finally learned to use Photoshop and I can now paint my own cars again, which gives some motivation to mapping. The first fruits of that was the 1994 Ligier JS39B, released a few weeks back, and now it's time for the Williams FW16B. I'm still far from the best painter, shaping is still my strength I feel, but it's better than the cars having none at all. 

There's still a fair bit of work still to do on the car, but I thought I would give an update nevertheless as the bulk of the livery is done. What's quite deceptive is that a lot of the TV and photos of the time gave the impressions that the cars were quite dark, whereas they were deliberately painted quite bright to be noticed. I went down to Donington museum just before it closed, and it had one of these Williams cars on display, in Australian GP spec, and the colours were quite vibrant. Transferring that direct onto this car however made it look wrong - especially as there are some bright tracks in GP4. So it wasn't the most straight forward to choose the right palette. 

The other thing about GP4 is that although it had quite a good reflections engine, with the sky domes being added to custom tracks, it makes the cars super shiny. Testing between various tracks gave vastly different results. As I haven't tweaked the alpha layer yet (the part that manages the strength of reflections in GP4) I picked Mid-Ohio as a place for these screenshots, a mix of lovely high resolution textures and barely any reflections and shininess. 

My other issue is that I'm right on the polygon limit that GP4 allows, there's actually a bit of detail I had to leave out of the shape in order to get it to run in-game. So it does mean that whilst my model contains various onboard cameras and a couple of other nice parts, I'll have to make a decision on what the final in-game release spec will feature. 

For the time being, enjoy the screenshots, I'll release the Australian GP spec car as soon as it is ready, whilst I busily work on the other versions of the car.