GP4: 1996 Forti FG01B walkaround part 2

In case you missed it, part 1 of the 1996 Forti FG01B walkaround click here: https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/2019/03/gp4-1996-forti-fg01b-walkaround-part-1.html

I was looking back at my old screenshots of this car before it was painted and found this photo:

The white parts are all the newly created parts, the yellow from the existing 1995 car.

Starting off at the front of the car, I remodelled the nose cone quite heavily from the 1995 car which was very low-poly. This is a lot smoother. Unfortunately there is shadow painted on the front wing supports that shouldn't be there, but I think it's a mapping issue.

I've shown the wireframe for this shot so that you can see I started working on smoothing the curve where the nose joins the the side of the cockpit. If I was doing that again today, I would put more polygons to smooth the curve even more.

I found one blurry shot of the cockpit which has this ledge on it. I'm not sure what it was for, maybe you could put your cup of tea there or something. I'm not too happy with the rear of the head rest, but I am pleased with how it joins to the chassis.

I'm quite pleased with how the sidepod turned out, that's one of my favourite parts of my work on this car. There is massive gap for the rear suspension elements which can't have helped the aero.

I like how in GP4 that you can crash the car and parts will fall off, and reveal some of the work going on underneath. The 3D body lines give a bit of depth to the nose.

I'm not sure why Celinho decided to paint his own body lines that don't follow the 3D ones. The hole at the rear of the engine cover (by the Ford logo) is painted on, and it's nicely done. The 1995 rear wing does not look out of place, and the new rear wing endplates fit on very well.

There aren't too many shots of the rear, so its difficult to model this accurately, but from what I could tell, with a little artistic licence, you can see they had a unique approach, with the central part looking more like an extended turning vane than a diffuser. You can see a lot of the gearbox/rear suspension and engine exhausts through the rear of the car.

Here, the car is without its engine and sidepod covers revealing the internals of the car. They are taken from Oggo's Benetton B196 (with permission), hence it comes a Renault engine logo. GP4 doesn't do shadows from the car onto itself, so whilst its nice to have nice textures on engine and a lovely shiny exhaust, in race conditions its usually under shadow and black.

I hope you enjoyed the walkaround of the Forti. It's not the best looking car (not really my fault!), and it's not one of my best models (compared to the rest of the 1996 grid), however many lessons were learned from this car that I developed into the other cars.

GP4: 1996 Forti FG01B walkaround part 1

In the second of my series of my GP4 cars walkarounds, I look back at the first car I created for the 1996 season, the Forti FG01B. There's a bit more about how Forti got on in 1996 in my model review blog post here: https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/2019/03/143-model-review-1996-forti-fg03-ford.html

The car was essentially an updated version of their 1995 car, the FG01, which itself was an updated F3000 car.

@UnusualF1 @1990sF1 Forti team launch. Remember this amazing team <3 ? Forti 1995 pic.twitter.com/LJBwziyudv

— UnracedF1 (@UnracedF1) May 23, 2016

I'll come back that when I look back at the 1995 cars. So my starting point, similar to the Minardi M195B, was the 1995 mod version of the FG01 that I created.

1995 Forti FG01 from the GP4 1995 mod

I started off thinking I would re-use parts of the 1995 car, but eventually I would remake it all, with perhaps only the wings making it onto the FG01B.

Putting the two cars next to each other, you can see that there is a lot more detail and effort gone into the 1996 car, owing much to my own learning curve in modelling cars. The shape of the nose is a lot smoother, the sidepods are a lot more realistic and the engine cover is much closer to the real model. The side-head support looks like an after thought, just tacked on for the sake of the regulations, which was what the team did in real life.

The diffuser is pretty basic too, especially when we start looking at the other 1996 cars where teams had started to develop them since the major change in diffuser regulations during the 1994 season, Forti were left behind in this region.

The FG01B was just a stop gap whilst the team prepared for their actual 1996 car, the FG03 (which is beautifully made by Soulbringer in GP4). Like the Minardi, the suspension and damage model are taken from the 1995 mod.

Overall, the car is a step up from the models in the 1995 mod, but its probably the most clunky in terms of my shaping ability in the 1996 mod. I like the work on the nose and the sidepods, but the cockpit sides and the area just in-front of the sidepods I'd would do differently today.

The textures were done by Celinho and so my thanks go to him for painting it, though there are areas of the texture I'd like revisiting if I was around to give feedback when it was created. So below are a few shots without the textures applied.

I was still perfecting my technique of how to make a model with nice smooth normals around the curves and this was my first attempt at bodylines. In fact, the method I adopted for the Minardi for bodylines is the same that I use today, but this was my first attempt at them. You can see where the polygon lines are denser as to where I tried to make a smooth shape with the light bouncing off it correctly.

You can see from this angle from the rear how the engine cover was hastily amended to incorporate the driver side head rest protection. I can't imagine the wake coming off that and how draggy it would have been and probably would have made the rear wing much less effective.

Without the wireframe, you can see how the light bounces off each surface smoothly (ish). The bodylines are also clearly seen here, though looking back, I forgot to create the front suspension cover.

Click here for part 2, where I will look at some of the details of this car.
Below is a video of a converted version of my car in rfactor 2.

You can download this car along with season specific liveries in the GP4 1996 mod.
1996 GP4 Mod Download Part 1
1996 GP4 Mod Download Part 2