GP4: 1996 Ferrari F310 walkaround part 3

For the third part of the walkaround, I will be looking at the cockpit, the rear of the car, and some of the internal parts of the 1996 Ferrari F310 created by Nick Ovey and Ebi Attard. If you missed the first two parts, you can read them here, part 1 and part 2.

The cockpit is pretty basic, at a time in GP4 when there wasn't really much attention put into making cockpits accurate, as the in cockpit view used a generic model for all cars. Some nice touches are the onboard camera, as placing the camera on top of the rollover bar started to become the norm in 1996.

The wireframe is shown on the shot above, so that you can compare some of the techniques used on this car compared to some of my cars of a later period. The same philosophy applies with more polygon usage around curved regions, whilst large polygons are used for flat surfaces.

The Ferrari were one of the teams caught out with the side head-rest protection regulation, new for 1996. They had the highest of all the teams, something that affected the flow to the airbox above the drivers head, and it was common to see Schumacher and Irvine to drive down the straights with their head as over to the side as they could manage.

Moving onto the rear of the car and this is an area where perhaps artistic license ruled over accuracy, though it is not bad by any means.

There have been some lovely photos of the car with its engine cover off, so it was good to see that faithfully recreated on this car. whilst it is basic and a lot of it covered by the radiators, it's good enough for you to get an idea of what is there. Ferrari were quite unique in that they didn't run a black airbox, with the prancing horse featuring prominently on it.

Here is a shot of the inside of the car from the rear. For comparison, I have a screenshot of the F310 created for F1 2013. It's a shame that the car doesn't make it into the classic part of the 2018/19 game.

As you can see, the 2013 model uses many more polygons and attempts far more detail but the proportions are pretty similar. What I'm saying is that though the GP4 car, created by amateurs and aiming for less detail, have done a fantastic job and holds up well against the F1 2013 version which was created by professionals with probably better source material to work from.

GP4: 1996 Ferrari F310 walkaround part 2

Welcome back to part 2 of my 1996 Ferrari F310 GP4 car walkaround. This car has been beautifully recreated by Nick Ovey and Ebi Attard.

The high nose created by the Ferrari is very reminiscent of the Minardi high nose adopted in 1995, with the bulbous undersection and the angled supports. Personally I loved the look. The front wing is simple but accurate, Ferrari running three elements, which wasn't unique or new, but most other teams ran simple two element front wings.

New rules for 1996 meant that the front wing endplates must be rounded to avoid punctures on collision. Ferrari's version is notably quite rounded. You can see the vanes underneath the front wing and the undercut at the rear of the endplate, something they had developed on their 1995 car. The nose should have been easy to integrate, but I had to make a slight adjustment to the top of the nose and the angle to make sure the high nose was not too low. The textures are nicely integrated with the shape with the bodylines and how the suspension connects with the monocoque.

Moving towards the cockpit, there is the small bump in front of the cockpit. This I believe is to do with a regulation with the steering wheel, that as the steering wheel turns, the wheel must not exceed the height of the monocoque.

You can see the bargeboards on the F310 and the floor as it guides the air underneath the sidepod and towards the diffuser.

Here is a close up of the underneath of the sidepod, nicely done by Nick and Ebi. The curvature of the top of the sidepod is spot on for me.

Here is the front of the sidepod, again I think this is beautifully done and kept at a very low polygon count, whilst keeping lovely smooth normals.

You can see the original car in Nick Ovey's page http://njovey.com/3d/ferrari-f310/

GP4: 1996 Ferrari F310 walkaround part 1

Next up in my walkaround series from the GP4 1996 mod is this one. The Ferrari F310 I wasn't really involved in, the main shape and work being done by Nick Ovey and Ebi Attard. I only got involved with helping them get the car in-game and creating the high nose, so that will be the car that I will review. If I remember correctly, this car was released years after the original McLaren, but a little before the Benetton by Oggo. So in my review, it's not for me to judge it according to the standards of some of my later works when I was pushing the boundaries of accuracy.

The car has good proportions overall, and is a pretty accurate shape. The car has lots of nice source photographs so that you can get some really good reference shots for modelling. What I did forget to update on this car was the rear winglet endplate, which should have been updated from the early season version.

If you notice from my other cars from the front and rear views is that everything lines up nicely, the width of the front wings, the sidepods etc. Sadly on this car the rear winglets exceed the width of the rest of the car. 

The John Barnard designed Ferrari for 1996 season was known as the truck, because of how it handled, perhaps not fitting for the arrival of double World Champion Schumacher. Somehow, he managed to eek out three victories in a car that didn't deserve to be challenging the Williams at all. 

The car started out the season with a low nose, though the nose itself was slightly raised giving more surface area to the front wing. This concept was ditched by the Canadian Grand Prix. There was no change to the main chassis to accommodate this, so the high nose had to be raised from the bulkhead forwards, which led to the slightly awkward bulbous shape. Compare this to the F310B for the 1997 season when nose and chassis were designed together in a more tightly fitted and slender and sleek shape.

Barnard also returned to a raised sidepod, something similar to the double floor concept tried (and failed) on the 1992 car. From this angle, you can see the sidepod is completely separated from the floor until the very rear.

As usual, you can read about how the car fared in my model review found here: https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/2019/03/143-model-review-1996-ferrari-f310.html

GP4: 1996 Minardi M195B walkaround part 2

In case you missed it, part 1 of this feature can be found here. https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/2019/03/gp4-1996-minardi-m195b-walkaround-part-1.html

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

GP4: 1996 Minardi M195B walkaround part 1

You can read a bit more about Minardi's season in the model review I did of this same car. https://fongugp4.blogspot.com/2019/03/143-model-review-1996-minardi-m195b-ford.html

I was learning a lot about modelling, and I still am, constantly trying to improve my skills and my 3D models. Having been a big part of bringing updated cars to the 1995 mod, and wanting to focus more on retro mods than modern day cars at the time, I decided to start on the 1996 grid. Because I knew that I would continue to improve my modding skills, I decided if I started at the rear of the grid, the ones nearer the front will be the best cars of the mod, that was the theory anyway.

The Minardi M195B was actually the second car that I did for 1996. The real car being an updated version of the M195, the 1995 version of the car was where I started for proportions, though no part of the 1995 car made it onto the 1996 model.

1995 Minardi M195

By the time that the 1996 cars were mapped and painted, I had departed from GP4, so I wasn't able to communicate effectively about some of the details I had put into the shape and how I envisioned they would be painted. This one was painted by Celinho.

At the time, I wasn't confident enough to create my own suspension, so the brakes and suspension on this car are taken (with permission) from Nick Ovey's 1995 Jordan. It also contains the generic engine and gearbox from the 1995 mod too. That's partly because there are not that many photos around of the insides of this car, and at the time, I was more concerned about the main body of the car.
I suppose I was using the Haas approach to F1, taking parts from existing cars and focusing on the aero surfaces.

I also find the rear ends of cars difficult to model, because most of the photos from race weekends are under shadow, so you can't see what you are to model. These days, if the cars are still around at demos or being displayed, you get some better high resolution pictures, but back when I was making some of these lower end cars, I had to use a bit of artistic license.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this car. When you put effort into the details, its easy to lose the perspective of the overall proportions of the car, I feel I managed to add detail whilst maintaining a good basic shape. The 1995 mod for example had different authors, so each author produced cars to their own perceived scales, so simple things like the heights of the rear wings (which by regulations is a constant) varied a lot in the GP4 mod. So I wanted to make sure that there was a consistency in the cars that I created for the 1996 mod.

To stop this post from being too long, I will drill into the detail of this car in the next post.

In the meantime, you can see a conversion of this in rfactor 2 in the video below:

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