It was a usual morning a week ago until I found out that the filming for Wynonna Earp's fourth season got delayed due to monetary issues from the production house. Tons of fans rallied on Twitter with the hashtag #FightForWynonna and has tagged SyFy and IDW Publishing accounts in hopes to make sure the filming can continue. I had no expectation that this day won't come and my show would face the same situation that once suffered other shows like Timeless, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Lucifer, with two of which were actually renewed after its original cancellation status. Apparently, this fight was also parallel to One Day At A Time as well given the show's production hiatus as well. Many brought their GIFs from the show, but many brought in fan arts and creations as well to help strengthen the rally, and show that there are a part of the Earpers with artistic tastes.
Yours truly? Well, I haven't considered making anything until I found out I actually made a Wayhaught MP4-12C a long time ago, and that I haven't done skinning in a while while I already packed myself a new concept at disposal, both the livery and the project. It's been quite a long time since I worked something along the lines of skinning which, actually, was almost a year ago when I reworked my old car and made something out of the Formula RaceRoom (and on a side note, I haven't touched any inches of the PVP Engineering Aston Martin yet, but I'll go into that later). Barring my work on the Bachelor's thesis, I focused myself on making some 3D stuffs just to learn myself at it and did a couple of watered down liveries I'd like to work in the future with the Wayhaught car's designs being one of them. Working with that, new ideas materialized and a new concept just popped.
FROM CONCEPT TO REALITY
 |
| Working concept on the new livery design, relying on a hand-made 3D model with texturing process done in Blender. Here you can see how the model and the texture look like. |
The project started out roughly four days ago with a new base and a new concept after jotting down some livery ideas courtesy of my "placeholder car" project for Blender in which I test out some livery concepts I would like to make. This placeholder project was conceived a long time ago before starting a new project and only consisted of simply the car's body and the wheels, still adopting the low-poly style I have established almost a year ago. The new concept livery inherits the same color scheme as the McLaren (albeit with alterations) but actually adopts an all-new design in which now the gold color becomes a complementary color to the white below which in turn allowed more colors to pop in in terms of sponsorship. It turns out all "key" sponsorships have their colors blend well with the livery so of course it's a right decision to make.
As you know already, the first livery takes its inspiration from the 2006 TAKATA DOME NSX driven by Ryo Michigami, Takashi Kogure and Katsutomo Kaneishi which ran on that year's Super GT season, with the source material's white color become red and the source's green being gold. This time, the new livery takes on multiple sources for the inspiration, but the main inspiration for this new design is none other than the red, gold, and white #48 Lotus Sport UK Evora GT4 driven by Phil Glew & Sailesh Bolisetti during the 2012 season of British GT Championship. The new design was all but conceived until RaceRoom announced that the Lotus Evora GT4 would be available in RaceRoom Racing Experience in late November, of which the described livery caught my attention and "synced" well with the Wayhaught colors. This design prompted me to improve what the current livery lacks and quickly jot down about how this could be applied to the final product.
Another inspiration for this car came from the car that ran in the 2001 All-Japan GT Championship in the form of Loctite Mugen NSX, of which Ryo Michigami and Hidetoshi Mitsusada fronted the car's championship campaign. Given that both the British GT and JGTC liveries are kinda similar to each other, I "hacked" Loctite NSX's base design but added the British GT touch to it, along with the vertical stripe that spans the car's length, but this time in gold in contrast to the Japanese source material's black color. Incidentally, the way the livery design on the sides is done also resembles the 2000 Castrol Dome NSX which, apparently, is the Loctite Mugen's predecessor car that earned the Mugen x Dome Project entrant the #1 car number in the next season. More incidentally, the TAKATA Dome car was run by none other than the Dome racing as well after the split between Mugen and Dome teams at some point, so it might be safe that the Wayhaught team is basically the in-universe version of Dome racing. Other than that, my friend on Discord also pointed out similarities with the 1998 EMKA McLaren F1 GTR LM as well.
Since the #FightForWynonna still goes on and I've been itching to go back into car skinning for a game, I think I might have an idea to rep #WynonnaEarp my way 😏 #Wayhaught— [R]endy A Y (@RnTheAndrian) February 23, 2019
Still WIP tho... pic.twitter.com/g67ci7WVbk
As the #FightForWynonna hashtag spread like wildfire, the concept came in handy to be applied in yet another car that could make a better fit for the design, in which for this case it's QtoR's NSX Super GT. The design that has been made in the placeholder car I made is adapted to the project step by step to see whether the adapted design fits the expectation. Side design, barring the rear sides, was a first priority, followed by key sponsors needed, the stripes, the wing colors, the air intake, and the rear part before going with the front. The initial design was posted on Twitter during the first days of the hashtag trending with five retweets and six likes at the time of the posting. This particular tweet also trended along with my wish for having PS4 and Gran Turismo Sport to make this kind of livery as well.
Project continued with the additional design which spanned the rear part of the sides, continuing the stripe design the car has which in turn also altered the design for that part of which the NTR Doccubus logo is now part of the white coloring instead of red, but at the same time allowed the sponsor to have its original red color so it can blend with the color, bettering the design. Adjustments to the front striping were also made to achieve the expected curvature of the design given the model's topology in the template. The car's details (within the details.dds file) also incorporates the golden wheels and the blank tire walls in contrast to the original's white wheels and Bridgestone tires (with the fact that the team's tire brand is Rumplestilt, the in-universe Bridgestone), plus the final detail in the window banners. Alpha layer adjustments are the cherry topping for the basic design, with the aim to make the gold colors in the design shine.
Finally, sponsors are further refined in terms of placement layouts and adjusted to fit the aesthetics, plus blending in some new sponsors as well: Docstache, Nedley's Office (meant to be a play on Keiichi Tsuchiya's defunct company Kei Office), Ghost River Triangle, Dom & Kat, Black Badge
Apparently, this is literally the first personal skin from a personal project that's basically a finished product. Although this could have a couple of small fixes on the way, I haven't finished any WIP of mine I showed throughout the entirety of this series. Most, if not all, weren't finished products due to various problems, so I'm glad that I could go through with this one, and end up paving my way to rally for the show's continuation and marking a proper return to skinning. The numberplate could still be planned in a long time, but for now, this is literally a finished product, although it falls under Personal skin as I don't really intend to release this skin for public consumption, especially with the new project I'll be working on...
PROJECT POLISHING
 |
| Two skins, one team. |
Now that there are two cars with the Wayhaught sponsorship, it's time to spill the tea about the new project which actually supersedes the old one, a project that combines the car structure of Grand Tour Racing while adopting elements of Ridge Racer Type 4 in which better cars have unique livery designs. This also means that team concepts will be pretty much be in play when I start to make another team based on any scripted television series. This is an improvement from the World Fandom Championship idea which teams are categorized based on the show's genre, but for this project I ultimately dropped the categorization and focus on a more proper presentation, especially taking into account a couple of different car classes that shall be included in the project as this will span more than just sports cars.
While there are no plans yet for the final numberplate design, there are actually design rules to comply for new teams: beside of basing teams from scripted television series (or movies to an extent), main sponsorship for that team must have a tie to an element from the source material. This can either be an actor/actress’ name, a character name, a ship name between involved characters (which is basically the case for Wayhaught), a fictional location, or a fictional corporation appearing on the source material, while other sponsorships can include those not related to any of the above as long as source-based sponsorships are predominant. This means limiting a number of allowed non-source sponsorships for those based on video games (like Ridge Racer and Real Racing 3 for example) and original ones whose sponsors designs weren't made.
Currently the team has a working name of "Team Wayhaught" while searching for better names for as long as the reference is as subtle as possible (initially it was "Emily Andras Racing Project", which was eventually dropped because it was too explicit in terms of reference). Sponsorships pertaining to Wynonna Earp are presented the same way the cars in Ridge Racer reference Namco's games and characters as sponsorships, while other sponsors (like Arkbird, Kilik, and QuanticFire) are treated as "guest sponsorships" for the team. Rumplestilt however would break the rule as it actually references the Once Upon A Time character of the same name, but given it is a tire supplier for the universe, this goes into exception
From the first time we meet this team, we know that the founder which we can refer to as "totally not Emily Andras" brought her former team Doccubus Valkyrion Racing (a play on Docomo Dandelion Racing from Formula Nippon/Super Formula series and Emily Andras' past show Lost Girl), and eventually formed this team in 2016 with the backing of Wayhaught Corporation, a fictitious (duh) Japanese-Canadian safety equipment company akin to now-defunct Takata. The team debuts with the 2014-spec McLaren MP4-12C and with the introduction of the recent skin in this post the team has moved up a class and fight with the ex-Super GT NSX. Deeper team profile and final car roster for the team are currently being worked on as the points of interest, and while that, I managed to fix the MP4-12C livery as well, giving it some needed updates and make it yet another finished design, of which you can check the gallery below.
Speaking of car rosters, teams will have a couple of cars from various categories, being touring cars, grand tourers, prototypes, rally cars, and open wheelers, as well as a tuner car (almost mirroring GRID Autosport for that matter). In Grand Tour Racing, each team has a sports car, an open wheeler (the Indy), a rally car, a rally raid (called Dakar), and a buggy. I brought such a concept in mind assuming that each team can own any class of car to compete in a particular racing series, but this time the "stage" system ala Ridge Racer Type 4's Real Racing Roots deepens the roster in that the team can even possess a car of better performance class. Most cars in six different categories mentioned would have unique livery designs from each other, but each class will surely have different designs. For example, a Wayhaught car in, say, a tuner category has the same design as the MP4-12C GT3 car, but a higher level car in that category may have a livery way different than the Super GT NSX. As the car roster is in a wider scope than just what's available in TMUF, there's a possibility that other medias for showcase would be used, but if the same car in TMUF is available in another game, it's all just a matter of importing the whole design.
MISSION FIRST (PUBLIC) SKIN
 |
| Team Taisan's All-Japan GT Championship contender since 1994, the Taisan Starcard Ferrari F40. For two years, the now-defunct team ran the Italian sports car for two seasons with different livery iterations. This particular model was part of the auction held in Suzuka November last year (Image: FCHGT.com) |
However, this skin is just a start of something bigger which would be my first Carpark release. Given that GKRacer has provided the amazing Ferrari F40 LM a long time ago, the time has come to up the game for a new mission; the Taisan Starcard F40 LM that competed in the early years of All-Japan GT Championship. There are two versions of the livery to be made with the existing wheel design can make way to the red version (pictured above) of the livery, while the Advan colors would require a new wheel design of which only the original author can put. Nevertheless, this will be a big focus for my next skin and put into a higher priority, especially with the fact that I've already found some of the decals needed to complete it.
Outside of TMUF scope, I'm currently looking for 3D models that can be used as a media to showcase my livery designs for my future creations so it can be applied in playable form where available. Apparently, this might come in handy as well for my future Turbo Sliders cars as well, but that's another topic, really...
~[R]
No comments:
Post a Comment