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