GP4 - 2022 McLaren MCL36 (with cyberpunk livery) - download

 

2022 McLaren MCL36 by Fongu

Back in January this year, I released finished version of the 1994 McLaren, and so it's only fitting that I release the latest version of the car as driven by Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo. This car comes in the early season shape but I've updated the livery closer to the mid-season variation. They did have different logos appearing at each race, but I've picked the most generic and reasonably recent livery to include in this release. 

It just so happens that as I was finalising this car for release that McLaren announced a new livery for the Singapore and Japanese GP. In conjunction with their partner, OKX, the car comes with cyberpunk inspired pink, with artistic internals. 

2022 McLaren MCL36 'cyberpunk' by Fongu

I hope you enjoy this release as much as I enjoyed creating it for you. Thanks again goes to Carl_gpgames for creating the lower lods for this release. 

GP4 - 2022 Alpha Tauri AT03 - download

2022 Alpha Tauri AT03 by fongu

I present to you my first 2022 car for GP4, the Alpha Tauri. After releasing a 1994 Minardi car, I now release the latest car from the Faenza based team. All new regulations for this season means new shapes and different shaping challenges. Though the livery is relatively simple, the lines are curved and go through several seams on the mapping that made it a bit more challenging. However, I hope you like the result.

To me, this is one of my favourite liveries on the grid for 2022. Alpha Tauri started out the season with white wings, but like many teams, the car was over weight and teams began to run less and less paint on their liveries, running with exposed carbon fibre instead. Personally, I prefer the darker wings. Sadly it's not been a particularly successful season on track, after the many highs of the previous two seasons, this car has spent much of its time in the lower midfield. 

The car has a different nose to the other teams, in that the leading front wing element meets the nose at the top, bringing back memories of the 1990 Tyrrell, especially in blue and white. That car, the Tyrell, was the car that kicked off the high nose trends. 

Back to the AT03, this is similar to the 2021 standard of cars, so not super high in details like my 1990s cars, but aiming to be simple, smooth and accurate. It should lighter to run on less powerful machines. My thanks goes to Carl_gpgames for creating the lods for this release, much appreciated.

GP4: Assorted 2022 Italian GP helmets

Here's a bumper helmet release with all bar one of the special new Italian GP helmets available for GP4. It's been hard work trying to get such a large number of helmets together in a relatively short amount of time, but I your appreciate tokens and messages of support.

Valterri Bottas 2022 Italian GP helmet

Valterri Bottas came to Italy with a helmet inspired by the legacy of Alfa Romeo, with the Italian flag visible in every angle, the darker red of the Alfa Romeo brand, and an early version of the badge used from around 1915. There's also nice art work at the back with Farina's championship winning 159 and a more modern, entirely fictious F1 car on the other side. The gold trim is a nice touch from Tiffany Cromwell. 

Zhou Guanyu 2022 Italian GP helmet

The other Alfa Romeo driver, Zhou Guanyu, went for a pizza inspired helmet, with a very subtle cardboard texture with the lines of his usual helmet design with various drips, both sides of the helmet being different. The Monza pizza at the back is a nice touch from KV Designs. 

Charles Leclerc 2022 Italian GP helmet

Ferrari turned yellow for the Italian GP, which is in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Monza Circuit. Other than red, yellow is the secondary colour of Ferrari, which is taken from the flag of Modena. Adrien Paviot adapted the yellow into the design with various black lines, along with the large 75 years of Ferrari's first production car being produced. Simple, but effective. 

Carlos Sainz Jnr 2022 Italian GP helmet

Carlos' helmets are designed by Dave Designs, and they merge the Modena yellow with the Spanish flag and some metallic greys. A very unique design, with the Italian flags having a slight crumpled foil effect. 

Mick Schumacher 2022 Italian GP helmet

Mick Schumacher felt like a change, having run his Miami GP colours every since the fifth race of the year. He intends to run this design as his regular helmet for the next couple of races. Designed with Jens Munser, the helmet design remains the largely same, but with a different pallette, now a less luminous yellow merged with pink. 

Esteban Ocon 2022 Italian GP helmet

Yes, it's another Schumacher helmet, but this is Esteban Ocon's helmet. There are pictures of him karting with Schumacher's red helmet, clearly a long time fan. This helmet is clearly inspired by the Ferrari version of the German driver's helmet, with MS logos exchanged for his own EO logos. I like the way the EO logo is merged into the top design where the MS logo would have been under the 7 stars. The logos are nicely worked into this retro design, with Schumacher senior's Italian GP victories commemorated on the rear. 

Sebastian Vettel 2022 Italian GP helmet

Sebastian Vettel, the ex-Ferrari driver, raced his final Italian GP and has fond memories of his first victory at the track, not in the Italian Ferrari team, but at the Italian based Scuderia Toro Rosso team back in 2008. Simple, yet effective celebration of many happy years of the Monza circuit. 

Nyck De Vries 2022 helmet

Nyck De Vries, the outgoing Formula E champion, has the benefit of having driven three different 2022 F1 cars. His third was in FP1 for the Aston Martin team, which he did a great job at on the Friday. But on Saturday, Albon was taken ill (get well soon Alex) and Nyck, who is the official reserve shared by Mercedes powered teams, was called back to Williams. And what a weekend he had, qualifying well ahead of his team-mate, and equalling Alex's best finish in the same car in 2022 so far. I started off by following the blueprints of the helmet, designed by NJ designs, who designs helmets for a number of junior category drivers, but this is his first design to feature in a Formula 1 race. However I noticed the actual helmet had some quite big changes, so I had to amend certain parts of this helmet to fit. Also no other driver runs the Stilo helmet with the solid wing, Stroll and Bottas running clear wings. So I had to put together the shape, which is included in the helmet pack. 

Pierre Gasly 2022 Italian GP helmet

Former Italian GP winner continues to run variations of the same helmet, designed by Adrien Paviot, this time with Italian flag coloured trim. The PG and 10 logos now have a rainbow swirlly reflective effect, and it's even more busy with Italy, Monza text and the Monza track map added to the mix. 

Yuki Tsunoda also ran a special helmet, but this is the same helmet he wore at Imola earlier in the season, so that's in the pack already. 

That leaves Daniel Ricciardo's helmet on my to do list. I look forward to creating the Valentino Rossi inspired helmet, but until then, you can enjoy all 10 special helmets above in the usual link below. 

My thanks again goes to Jvinu for all the shapes and templates, and allowing me to amend his shapes for GP4. 

Download Link | (mirror)

GP4: 1994 Minardi M193B Ford - Spanish GP

1994 Minardi M193B by Fongu

I proudly present to you the latest 1994 car to be released. Going against the trend, set by myself, I've not done the Australian GP car, but I've gone back to the Spanish GP for this one. 

Minardi started the 1994 season with an interim car, which was the reasonably successful 1993 car updated for the 1994 season, designed by Aldo Costa and Gustav Brunner. The team merged with BMS Scuderia Italia as the smaller teams began to struggle for cash to survive, but it wasn't until round 6, the Canadian GP, when the new M194 was completed. Still, the old car, in the hands of Pierluigi Martini scored points, with a fifth placed finish at the Spanish GP. 

In the released mod, you'll find a quick update to the existing Minardi M193B. Not content with that, I wanted to update the shape a bit more, which was started out as a quick car loosely based on the 1993 car by Oggo. It was going to be a quick job, which the shell was... and then I got to the detail. 

Now I wanted to honour the original work, so I'm not replacing any cars in the first four GPs, so in reality, making this car was only for the one race. To reflect that, this car is ridiculously over engineered. My reasoning is that some of the parts made for this car can go into the M194 at a later date. 

The wheel hub assembly and some suspension parts on my Benetton released earlier this year was actually recycled off this car. 

Moving towards the cockpit, the mirrors are much more rounded than my previous models. The visor is much more sculpted and I've managed to figure out how to stop the glass from flickering in game. The cockpit has more details in, again with more polygons than some of my earlier 1994 models. 

1994 Minardi M193B by Fongu

As with my other cars, I will make an internal cockpit version of this, again at a later date. However with all the effort I've been putting into the cockpits, it wasn't that easy to see in-game, so I've been playing around with the external camera positions to make it a bit more realistic, and also show off some of the cockpit details on this car and others... expect that in an updated 1994 mod in the not too distant future. 

1994 Minardi M193B by Fongu

Unlike my other 1994 cars, this car got the full internal details treatment. The Lotus had half an engine, but here I've created a lot more detail. Consequently, the 3D model is way beyond the limit that GP4 allows. It took me a while to find a way to get this car running in GP4 properly and so was left gathering dust for many months. I toyed with the idea of a poly-crunched version of the engine and gearbox, but in the end I managed it. 

A while ago, I had the idea of using different scenes, similar to how tracks are made, and I realised that the face/vertices limit in GP4 is per scene. So with multiple scenes, meant multiple times more polygons per car. However, it came with quirks, namely that it was flickering, it came off when you damaged the car. You'll notice odd things coming off the cars, including the driver body, unfortunately that's a limitation of GP4, but it's one I can live with. With the Williams FW16B, there was only a small part assigned to another scene, it's a hidden part so it didn't really bother me, but with this Minardi, I had to put the whole engine and gearbox (over 30,000 polygons) in a new scene. Overall, it is just over 75,000 faces. 

I discovered the flickering was an issue of my own making. Previously I had exported from zmodeler into two separate .gp4 files and then merged them in GP4 Builder. Instead, if I exported the whole thing in Zmodeler, exported the extra object in GP4 Builder, create a new scene and import it back in there, that fixed the issue. This is also possible and working with Oggo's Blender plugin where the same process can be done there. 

1994 Minardi M193B by Fongu

The result is that good ingame, here is the car smashed up to expose the internal parts. Sadly it comes flying down the track as damage, but at least it's working as it ought. 

1994 Minardi M193B by Fongu

Just a quick note to say that this car shares the same carbon file as the Benetton B194.

Thanks to Oggo and Carl_gpgames for the additional screenshots, their work on the Blender plugin and associated issues was what motivated me to get this car finished and working. I also want to give a quick shout out to the ASR Formula team, who make excellent cars from the 1990s for Assetto Corsa, and their beautiful and exquiste models are, in part, an inspiration for the detail that's gone into this car.

1994 Minardi M193B by Fongu

GP4: Verstappen's Dutch GP helmet added

 Max Verstappen

Max Verstappen 2022 Dutch GP helmet

Max is going to run a helmet based on his father's (Joss the Boss) design. Max wanted to honour all the hard work Jos put in when he was a kid that culminated in him becoming World Champion last season. The colours are much brighter compared to his dad's helmet and it looks great with Max's lion on the top. 

Thankfully it was quite a quick design to recreate, and I couldn't wait to share it with you. Knowing my luck, he'll not run it in the race. 

Thanks as ever to Jvinu's Schuberth helmet shape and template, without which my work would not be possible.  

Download Link | (mirror)

Over on Race Department, Vullracer has now fully converted my helmets to Assetto Corsa, now with proper map files, and you can download them now https://www.racedepartment.com