GTA Mods: 1998 McLaren F1 for San Andreas (2004)

The game series that would eventually bring me into the industry, GTA was a past time I could dump countless hours into making mods for. Back in 2004 one of my best San Andreas mods was recreating my all time favorite needs for speed super car, the 1998 McLaren F1 and installing it into the game on PC. Using a really grass roots modding/modeling app called Zmodeler (Zanoza Modeler) by Oleg Melashenko and a few blueprints found from the net, one trigon at a time pushing single vertices into place I managed to create a fully built car with an interior and damageable parts. No normal maps back then just raw vertex mesh smoothing groups, diffuse textures, HDR shaded specular channels and the occasional constants emission shader for lights. At the time since GTAs doors only had single hinge swivel behavior I had developed a dummy node hack with an angular central offset back in the day for a Ferrari Enzo model I created for Vice City modding, borrowing ideas used on other creators Lamborghini scissors mods to trick the visual look of a dual hinge gull-wing style door opening - it was a first for the modding community at the time. By the time I had created this McLauren I had really perfected the offsetting technique.