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Niels Kjær
Denmark
Malling
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So there I am, beginning of March without a job, as the company is closing and moving its activitivities to a country with lower wages.
I need something in between applying for jobs, so I start up an old wish of mine: to create 3D buildings for Formula D.
I went to a model railroad shop which suggested building it in styrene, as they did not have anything to scale.
3 weeks later, still no job, but a grandstand so ugly it is never getting into the pictures section - I needed a new plan.
Enter
Giles Williams
United Kingdom
Leytonstone
London
who had created a few different car sets on www.shapeways.com, a site who prints out the 3D models you create - Eureka!
From then, it was a matter of finding a 3D program (www.blender.org), and then starting the design process.
I decided to work on a pit building, as I thought that would be fairly simple and would add a lot to the game, at least I was right about 50% 
The first probvlem, as probably many others who design for games with many maps (in this case: tracks), was that the dimensions were not the same: on some tracks, the spaces are 1,7cm long, on others a bit longer, so I had to make a choice of spacing and chose 1,7 cm as the space length, with the knowledge that it will be a bit small on some tracks.
Also, I considered tracks with curved pitlanes and decided, that that was not something that I could make a pit building for, since my skills were clearly not up to the task of designing a building that can be curved either way. Sorry Monaco, Imola, Detroit, and Valencia, and sorry Spa for making a building so deep it cannot be used due to your first, sharp corner.
Upside is that it fits the rest enough to be playable - I think 
The first prototype was made, printed and painted and looks like this:
I was satisfied with the front, but looking at the back, it became apparent, it was too 'bare' for a building, where it only cost time to add details:
We have tested it in one race and it worked fine, only minor details needed to be sorted out, for instance the roof is not wide enough, and that means that a paper with 10 boxes inside will either have the outermost boxes visibly smaller than hte rest, or they boxes will not be aligned with the individual pits - more design work to do...
By now we are talking September (no, I am not fast), and I am sitting in my new job, so the redesign has taken some time.
However, it is done, the new prototype has a new top floor, raised pit wall and team signs on the back, it has been ordered and it in transit, I can't wait to get it!
The top sides are raised slightly to accomodate a piece of paper where players can write which pit they are using and how many pit points they have left. Who wants the pink pit - anyone?
Still in the works:
Grandstand, road barriers and tire walls, more about that later.
Thanks for reading, comments are welcome
Notes: If somebody could tell me how to make external image links smaller, I would be grateful.
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