GP4: Gezere's 2020 Alpha Tauri AT01 Texture Update

Well it's been a bumper week of downloads from me. When taking screenshots of the Gasly helmet, I thought I could do a tweak to the textures on the Alpha Tauri. It was a quick edit of the alpha channels to change the reflection on the dark blue, which is matte in real life, with the white parts of the car the classic shiny/reflective gloss. So I've tried to replicate in this little update. 

This is just a tweak to the work done by Gezere, and season updates by Gap177 and the pack only includes the textures.

GP4: 1996 Sauber C15 walkaround part 3

Following on from Part 1 and Part 2 of my GP4 walkaround of my 1996 Sauber C15, here is the final installment looking at the rear of the car.

In the last section, I started talking a bit about the sidepods, maximising the surface area on the top of the sidepod, and having an elongated rear wing endplate to stop the wake from the rear wheels. You can see the winglets are not flat wings but have a slight curve to them.

There are a few small intakes and bumps on there too (which is easily missed without the wireframe), whilst the whole element is curved rather than flat. Presumably this is a compromised between housing the internal parts at the centre of the car whilst the edges of the engine cover are as low as possible to try and interact with the diffuser - a concept that Williams began on their 1994 FW16 which saw lower rear suspension and that distinctive anhedral lower rear wing.

Taking the rear wing endplates and winglets away, and you can see that they have an additional lower rear wing above the rear suspension. This, as mentioned previously, was a similar solution to the 1995 Benetton B195. You can see how smoothly the rear of the engine cover goes into this wing and then into the lower rear wing itself. It's quite a neat solution.

Minardi and Forti had some very basic diffusers, but the Sauber is where it starts to get interesting. In 1994, the new rules stated that the majority of the diffuser can only go as far back as the rear axle, which is usually where the driveshaft is, the centre of the rear wheel. Then in the middle, you are allowed to have this small area where the diffuser can extend to the rear of the car. The Sauber solution features quite a curve on the underside of this central section. As you squeeze the air into a smaller outlet, you encourage the air to go faster out that section, creating a difference in pressure between the lower part and the upper part of that diffuser tunnel.

With the rear wing taken out of the way, you can see how the suspension parts and the gearbox are housed, and the smooth engine cover.

You can see the sculpted rear jack supports, which is something I always enjoy modelling.

Here are a few shots of the car in GP4. Most the time you see this car screaming past in a blur and you don't really have time to see some of the detail that goes in. So I hope you enjoy some of the blurb and screenshots of my modelling experience. I find it all fun to model and for me it just makes playing it in game a little bit sweeter. I also enjoy trying to find some interesting onboard angles just to see some of the more complex areas of the car.

For more of my GP4 car walkarounds from 1996, you can read about them here: https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/p/1996-gp4-cars-walkarounds.html

GP4: 1996 Sauber C15 walkaround part 2

Part 1 of my 1996 Sauber C15 walkaround for GP4 is here: Part 1

I wanted to start off by showing the detail on the front end-plate. There is a small lip that extends to its widest point at the bottom which then curves in towards the car before it bends back out again at the back of the endplate.

One of the new regulations was that all endplates should have rounded top front edges to try and minimise punctures during contact.

The front part of the lower front wing element curves up in the middle and is lower on the edges. The trailing edge is flat. As mentioned previously, the upper front wing is a single element, rather than splitting into two elements in 1995.

You can see the single keel, the bump under the nose that connects the lower suspension arm, a solution employed by most teams who have adopted a high nose concept.

By this stage, I was making my own suspension elements. You can see that the polygons are actually attached to the car on the upper front arm.

The Sauber features a small bulge on the top of the monocoque which can be quite tricky to keep the normals smooth. The normals are how the light reflects off the car, and having smooth normals means having more polygons around complex curves to ensure the light bounces off it in a natural way. It's quite tricky to get right sometimes, but it's easy to spot a bad job. Back when polygon counts mattered in that you had to keep the count quite low, it was difficult to blend a wish to throw lots of polygons at a part whilst making it playable on a low spec PC.

Thankfully, there were a few more clearer pictures of the cockpit of the Sauber, and I tried to not use generic cockpit parts for the 1996 mod. So every individual dashboard, steering columns and extra buttons and knobs are unique on every GP4 car.

Something I did on the 1995 car was to make the sides of the cockpit quite rounded, so you can see a lot of the polygons have gone into that and the side-head protection to achieve that extra bit of realism there.

The front of the sidepods is quite smooth, but it's not that easy to model. Also with the barge-board there, it's often quite tricky to find photos of what is behind it.

I suppose the rear of the sidepod is a bit more interesting, with the lower part of it having an undercut to maximise that coke bottle effect above the floor/diffuser. The upper part of the sidepod is used essentially as a large wing, so it will slope down at the rear of the sidepods and they will want to maximise the surface area, so that's why you get an extension over the top part of the rear sidepod.

Also for 1996, you have these large winglets just in front of the rear wheels, with the majority of the teams elongating their rear wing end-plates to this winglet. This will stop the wake from the rear tyre from affecting the flow of air to the rear wing. Sauber's solution is quite neat.

Watch out for part 3 tomorrow.

GP4: 1996 Sauber C15 walkaround part 1

This is the 1996 Sauber C15 Ford. This was the second season where Sauber enjoyed works Ford engines, and it was Ford's first V10 in Formula 1. Ford would be preparing with Jackie Stewart and Paul Stewart for 1997 with the new Stewart Grand Prix, leaving Sauber to seek a customer engine deal with Ferrari whom they have long been associated, and even in 2019, they dropped the Sauber name in deference to the Alfa Romeo brand. You can read about how the car fared in the 1996 season as part of my model review: Sauber C15 Model Review

The 1995 Sauber C14 I created for the GP4 mod was one of the later cars that I had created and so it was noticeably better than some of the other cars in the mod. Though the 1996 car was built from scratch, the 1995 car was used for reference here or there.

My 1995 Sauber C14

The car is quite different from the 1995 car, with only really the lower rear wing that could be somewhat borrowed. The front wing went back to being a two element rather than 3 element. The nose and monocoque are a little more slim-lined than the 1995 which began life being a low nosed car. The airbox is much bulkier with a larger intake for the new V10 engine. The sidepod openings are also noticeably bigger. They have also adopted an additional wing element over the rear suspension taking its inspiration from the 1995 Benetton. The diffuser has also been developed, with many of the teams coming up with some interesting solutions which we will delve into in later.

I've managed to get some 'plan' shots from zmodeler before we get into the 3D views. Compared to some of the other cars on the 1996 grid, the Sauber looks quite bulky, with a larger nose and a wide airbox.

This car was mapped and painted by Bernard aka Gezere. Having painted all the Toro Rosso's since 2006 to today and a fair few Red Bull cars as well, I was glad that he turned his talents to one of my cars. He also did a stunning texture on my 2008 Toro Rosso STR3.

Overall, I'm really pleased with how this car turned out. I'm happy with the proportions and the textures are really nice too. I'm also quite pleased with the modelling techniques I've employed and how smooth the final model looks.

Look out for part 2 and part 3 coming  up. You can see my other walkarounds from the 1996 season here. In the meantime, here is a video of my car in rfactor2.