[HN Gopher] "The Famous F40" Vector Illustration
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"The Famous F40" Vector Illustration
Author : msephton
Score : 100 points
Date : 2023-07-15 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.gingerbeardman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.gingerbeardman.com)
| jansan wrote:
| So there is no SVG port of this drawing?
| msephton wrote:
| I just added a Downloads section with links to a PDF version
| and the original Canvas files. I could not generate any sane
| sized SVG file, I think the smallest attempt was 80MB, but you
| might have more luck. Let me know if you do!
|
| SVG did not exist when this illustration was created, EPS was
| the most portable format, but even that involves some
| "rendering down" from the complex objects supported in Canvas.
| qwertox wrote:
| The embedded YouTube video is worth watching, at least for a
| minute to see the amount of detail in the file.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I was a kid using a Mac that had Canvas, it could be used for so
| much, including creating levels for the game Avara. Somehow I've
| never been as comfortable with any vector editor as with canvas.
| I suppose I had better patience back then.
| acquacow wrote:
| Man, Avara was so much fun back in the day for how simple it
| was...
| msephton wrote:
| I still use Deneba Canvas occasionally (but mostly their app
| artWORKS, and sometimes UltraPaint) under emulation of Classic
| Macintosh System 7.5 on an iPad Pro!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26854990
|
| There are lots of fun Deneba articles on my blog. Including
| using tools only meant for Canvas in artWORKS and vice versa.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Nice writeup!
|
| > System 7.5 and 64MB RAM
|
| Phew, in 1994 I remember feeling lucky to use a color Mac at
| school. 64MB RAM though! Wow.
|
| The antialiased 20-megapixel version is so great to see as well.
| So many of these crops would make neat little sectional
| wallpapers even.
|
| The story reminded me...back in 2006 I was hired to do some 3D
| illustration work for my municipality. I believe I got those
| renders up to 25 megapixels in the end, after a FOSS developer
| friend wrote a rendering plugin that leveraged the disk and not
| just RAM (thanks Nik!).
|
| The final poster print is still on my wall to this day, but it
| was much, much more fun to scroll around the imagery on the
| computer and view all the little details. I hid some easter eggs
| in there that are still fun to mention to people.
|
| Mentioning megapixels, on the other hand, mattered to precisely
| nobody back then, at least nobody who worked on the project. In
| fact I still had print designers "confirming the DPI of the
| artwork you sent" long after we had agreed on the necessary pixel
| resolution for the digital art. Funny times.
|
| (There was more, too...megapixels didn't matter, ambient
| occlusion didn't matter, raytraced roughness and soft shadows
| didn't matter, lighting rigs didn't matter, custom hand-designed
| procedural textures didn't matter. Ugh! The frustration of
| learning the special aspects of some exciting new interest, and
| then only being able to type excitedly about it online in niche
| forums...)
|
| I gotta say I really love, in this particular F40 illustration,
| the way the specular reflections in the mirrors would seem to
| indicate that the car is resting on a cloud, high in the sky...
| lampiaio wrote:
| Holy moly. As a kid, Deneba Canvas was something I'd play with
| all the time on my Macintosh. That Ferrari sample would take
| forever to load and render on screen, and child me would look at
| it in awe, thinking the amount of detail was insane (and still
| is!).
|
| I remember trying to use the "blend" feature to see it morph into
| a simple geometric shape, but finding out it wouldn't work
| because the shapes were grouped. So I tried to ungroup them, and
| well, our poor 16MHz LCII with 4MB of RAM took a looong time to
| show all the objects and their respective bounding boxes, bezier
| node points and the like (just like he shows in the video! What
| an amazing mess).
|
| I did not know there was a whole story behind it, I'm very glad
| someone took the time to do a writeup about a sample file of all
| things -- but a legendary one, for sure.
|
| > "Maybe this will transport you back through time to when you
| were young!?"
|
| It absolutely did, it absolutely did. Thank you so much for this
| post!
| post_break wrote:
| The large scrollable version appears blank in Firefox on MacOS.
| msephton wrote:
| Thanks for the issue report! I've just this minute added some
| alternate image formats. Now it should serve AVIF (2MB), WEBP
| (4.5MB) or PNG (7MB) in order of preference. I guess it could
| also be security settings as I serve that huge image from a
| different subdomain for CDN purposes. Do you have any luck
| right clicking on it and opening it in a new tab/window?
|
| edit: checked and confirmed page working OK for me in Firefox
| 115.0.2 (64-bit) on macOS 12.6.7 Monterey.
| post_break wrote:
| Fixed!
| meerita wrote:
| Such memories rendering my vector illustrations in CorelDraw!
| They rendered like in the F40 video: object by object.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I drew the F40 and the Porsche 959 _so_ many times as a kid. And
| always terribly.
|
| I wonder if kids today get fascinated by cars these days like a
| bunch of us got back in the 80s with cars like the F40, the 959,
| the Testarossa or the Countach. And if so, what are those cars.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they still do. Today's super- and hypercars are
| still very much special. It's not like the F40 or Countach were
| ever everyday cars.
|
| Look at McLaren, Koenigsegg, Pagani. But also Ferrari and
| Lamborghini still.
|
| To be honest I wonder if kids follow them more than adults. It
| may be similar to dinosaurs, where peak knowledge and interest
| happens at around 8 years old.
| msephton wrote:
| Would also love to know this! Cars today seem less daring in
| terms of design, at least to my 40-something-year-old eyes.
| lttlrck wrote:
| There are many cars to get excited about, with outrageous
| visual and engineering designs. Materials science and drive
| train development is staggering.
|
| An off-the-top of my head (recency biased) selection:
|
| GMA T.50, Aston Martin Valkyrie, AMG One, McLaren Solus,
| McMurtry Speirling, Pagani Utopia, Koenigsegg Jesko.
|
| It's not the same as the 80's, the birth of the supercar and
| the fight for supercar supremacy, but it's still fascinating
| and just as out-of-reach as it was when I was drawing F40s as
| a kid.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Part of what made objects like this back then so fascinating is
| how difficult it was to retrieve any information about them.
| You had to buy a magazine, or you'd see specs in a trading card
| game, or you had a little model.
|
| Today you can just look up a YouTube video of the full tour and
| not much is left for the imagination.
|
| I'd wager it generates less excitement.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Does anyone know a site that sells a print of this? Or a link to
| the full res file? Would be a good one for my sons room...
| msephton wrote:
| You can buy prints of the original illustration by David
| Kimble, but this computer one I think you'd have to DIY.
|
| So, I just added a Downloads section to the page: PDF (2MB),
| original Canvas files as SIT (10MB) and a link to the
| containing CD-ROM (400MB; this was already linked from the
| article but I've repeated the link for ease of use).
| myself248 wrote:
| Is there a repository of impressive-but-vintage vector artwork?
| I'm restoring an old graphics plotter and I'd love some stuff to
| plot when I finally get it going.
| msephton wrote:
| Not that I know of. When DiscMaster website was around you
| could search for files by type across thousands of CD-ROMs on
| Internet Archive. I can do that for my own discs, but it's
| still not easy getting the files. We can only hope DiscMaster
| comes back online.
| Lammy wrote:
| Try one of the Corel Gallery CD-ROMs:
| https://archive.org/details/corel_gallery_1000000_win95
|
| And CorelDRAW! to manipulate them:
| https://archive.org/details/coreldraw8-disk
|
| e: You've probably seen some of them irl like on every dry
| cleaner window in San Francisco:
| https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/8m_SI-37Q2DjjLqn_QXK...
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| AA requires integer multiples of computing power and possibly
| another video frame or temporary matrix kernel registers equal to
| the number of pixels computed in parallel.
|
| The simplest form of AA is linear 2x which requires 4x the raw
| rendering computing power. The kernel applied is [[0.25
| 0.25][0.25 0.25]] where each cell represents a neighbor pixel in
| the expanded virtual frame reduced via a scalar sum.
| msephton wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed insight! I'm sure you noticed that I
| took the easy way out in the blog post. :)
| grecy wrote:
| Interestingly, when the F50 came out 8 years after the F40,
| Ferrari tried hard to stop direct comparisons between the two,
| knowing the older F40 was a much faster and brutal machine. It
| took 20 years before auto journalist Chris Harris directly
| compared them by absolutely thrashing them one after the other on
| the track [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MDTcXGsjuo
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Reminds me of the exact opposite to the vector f40: the Typhoon
| drawn in ... MS Paint! Feast your eyes on
| http://www.hisutton.com/The%20REAL%20Red%20October%20-%20Typ...
| :)
| msephton wrote:
| WOW!
| willis936 wrote:
| Sadly no MHD drive.
| Lammy wrote:
| I would love to see one of these done for the _other_ famous F40
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_F40PH
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| You probably already know about these, but I figure I'll share
| in case you don't:
|
| https://www.spoon-tamago.com/toei-project-unseen-maintenance...
| msephton wrote:
| All aboard the hype train!
| msephton wrote:
| "Whilst digging through some old CDs I found the source file for
| this famous vector illustration from the early 1990s. It's a
| technical drawing of a cutaway Ferrari F40 and was created by
| Dave Rumfelt using Deneba Canvas whilst he was working at Deneba
| Systems. It was based on an earlier physical (airbrushed?)
| illustration by David A. Kimble. There's also an embedded screen
| recording of me zooming into the illustration, and a 20-megapixel
| scrollable version."
| pengaru wrote:
| Such a missed opportunity for the original illustrator to omit
| even a glimpse of a single compressor or turbine wheel.
|
| Being twin-turbocharged was a major differentiator for the F40.
| Yet here I am seeing a whole lot of brackets, hoses, and bolt
| heads, but no sectioned turbo parts. We even get to see a pile of
| banal gears in the syncromesh gearbox, but no 100,000+RPM wheels
| that in large part make this car so iconic, BAH.
| msephton wrote:
| From what I can gather the original illustration was based on a
| real physical cutaway prototype Ferrari F40 from around 1987.
|
| If that is true, then what is visible or not is down to Ferrari
| themselves. Maybe they were keeping it secret at the time?
| pengaru wrote:
| Where does it say at your linked thread that it's drawn from
| a real physical cutaway prototype?
|
| I only see debate as to which features in the illustration
| correspond to which prototype/market etc. They're basically
| _trying_ to fit it to a specific variant.
|
| The article [0] linked by TFA says this: >
| The original was the culmination of David Kimble's six-month
| tenure at the Ferrari > plant combing through technical
| drawings, specs and other design materials.
|
| Which leaves me with the impression that David Kimble had
| substantial creative license in producing the illustration...
|
| It seems silly to think Ferrari would be hiding the
| turbocharger internals... the illustration clearly shows
| turbocharger systems like intercooler, wastegate, all the
| plumbing, and glimpses of the turbo housings. Just no
| compressor or turbine wheels, mildly disappointing omission
| of detail in what should be a highlight of the F40.
|
| [0] https://www.canvasgfx.com/blog/driven-by-design-david-
| rumfel...
| msephton wrote:
| Quite correct, I assumed too much about what Kimble was
| drawing from whilst at Ferrari. I stand corrected!
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