In the second part of the walkaround of my 1996 Minardi M195B, I want to talk about some of the details of the car and show some of the insides of the car that you perhaps don't get to see when you race it in game.
I like the front end of the Minardi, largely unchanged from the 1995 car, with its anhedral front wing supports, to the large fin that comes out the rear of the front wing, and the curve of the underside of the nose I quite liked as well. The front wing on this model is pretty basic, the only real detail on it is the gurney flap on the top surface. There are actually two fins underneath the front wing, there aren't too many photos that show them, but one is covered from this angle, the other acting like a bargeboard. This idea appeared on some early 90's Footworks, and you can see another angle a bit further down.
This was my first proper go at doing bodylines in 3D. One of the things I had started to perfect was being making effective use of polygons, not using too many on big flat surfaces, but instead concentrating them around curves. This gives smoother normals. So introducing bodylines took a little bit of experimenting with before I found a happy technique.
If you take away the nose cone, you can see some of the elements underneath the main surfaces. If you crashed the GP4 car hard enough, these parts become exposed, and I didn't want to put too much effort into it, but just a bit of detail as an easter egg if those parts came off in game. This is the only car where I have modelled this, though I did do parts of it on my 1994 McLaren.
If you've been following my Work In Progress shots of the 1994 Williams, you will see that I work on one half of the car and then mirror that towards the end. So apologies that you can see some gaps where I haven't joined the two parts together.
Here, you can see another angle of the front wing and the fins underneath that I mentioned. I started putting a bit more effort into the cockpit, particularly the dashboards. Whilst the dashboards were pretty generic in the 1995 mod, they are closer to the real thing in the 1996 cars.
New for 1996 was the side-head protection which was made mandatory on all cars, though Sauber had run their own version since the middle of 1994. Minardi's were particularly high. Perhaps you can't see it clearly in this screenshot, but I modelled the dint between the carbon fibre chassis and the soft head-rest. As the side head protection merges to the engine cover, that was not easy to get right, particularly as I had to put a bodyline through the middle of it, but I'll come back to that later. There's two small inlets just in front of the sidepods, which I think look better in 3D.
As you can see, with the body line modelled in 3D, you can actually remove the whole engine and sidepod cover to reveal the generic engine and gearbox. Because it was generic, that's why it's got a Renault engine in it, even though we all know it should be a Ford. As we go through the other cars, you will see this area become more tailored to the actual cars.
Moving towards the rear of the car, there is quite a basic diffuser. Adding the cable just before the front suspension just adds a bit of detail to this area. I enjoy the various ways in which the lower rear wings are attached to the chassis, it often produces some nice curves to model. The rear wing endplate itself as an indent on the leading edge around half way up - this was unique to Minardi. Also unique to Minardi was that winglet they had attached to the rear wing. Though it wasn't pretty, it gave that additional distinctiveness to the M195B.
For my final screenshot, I wanted to show a bit of the wireframe, as you can't quite see the detail with the dark blue. You can see how the rear of the side-head protection slopes off, reminiscent of some of the modern day F1 sidepods. There is quite a bit bump at the rear of the engine cover. At the rear of the car, there is another indent in the centre just in-front of the rear wing.
With the wireframe, you can see how I don't put too may polygons on the top surface of the sidepod, but around they are denser around the curves, and this just helps make the light shine off the car nicely as well as making the environment maps (reflections) appear better - though they aren't perfect in GP4.
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
