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R3E – Alex Hummler Interview

Posted on February 2nd, 2013 in RaceRoom Racing Experience 6 Comments

R3E – Alex Hummler Interview

Even if you`re a regular VirtualR reader, the name Alex Hummler might not ring an instant bell but Com8 surely will!

During the past few years, Alex has made a name for himself, creating some of the most stunning tracks for rFactor including the Nürburgring Nordschleife, Mainz-Finthen & the Salzburgring.

His talent didn’t go unnoticed as Simbin quickly hired Alex to join their staff and a new interview on the Simbin site has a little more background on the story:

When GTR by SimBin came out in 2005, I was instantly sucked into Simracing as I had never seen such realism in a computer racing game before. I started buying some equipment, my first FFB wheel and built some wooden supports to get a feeling of sitting in a real car. Later that year rFactor hit the shelves and this was when I started modding for that engine – at first doing texture updates then slowly growing into track modeling. We had that huge project of bringing a modern version of the Nordschleife to the PC. Georg was also part of the team. It was a big success within the community and is still being used a lot today – be it in league racing, endurance races (even 24h!) or just for fun driving.

Beside my studies, I started working on more and more tracks and it turned out to be my number one hobby. When I was nearly done with university, I got contacted by Jay who was following some of my work and I was invited to Sweden to visit SimBin. I can tell you that I was never so excited! It was the company that got me started with all this – and now they invite me over?! Someone poke me – I must be dreaming!

For more including a little peek at how Alex creates his tracks, make sure to check out the full story here.

GTOmegaRacing.com

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  • http://twitter.com/SeanvanderBurg1 Sean van der Burg

    Shame he isn’t making tracks for rf anymore, but R3E is going to be great

  • Anonymous

    he should be using laser scanned data to build his tracks he would give iRacing a run for it’s money.

  • http://twitter.com/sigmatc24 Sigmatc

    He deserves to be in a good company like simbin.

    Good luck. And the tracks in R3E are great :)

  • David Wright

    Talking of money I suspect laser scanning is one reason why iRacing tracks are twice the price of RRRE tracks.

    Hopefully there is or will be a cheaper solution than iRacing’s for laser scanning, then we can all have laser scanned tracks at a lower price. A vehicle mounted laser scanner? Someone has laser scanned the F1 tracks for the F1 teams – perhaps this could be bought for a lower price than sending a team to do the job just for iRacing?

  • http://twitter.com/Michael_42 Michael

    Yeah, you’d sort of expect if tracks license their content that it would eventually become the norm for them give a laser scan (and cad / design stuff for buildings, bridges and whatnot) etc as part of that licensing. At least for the more popular tracks.

    Really it makes little sense for n different games to turn up and scan the same track. If the track did it and simply sold the data as part of the license, the cost would be spread amongst them.

    Although I suppose any game dev scanning it themselves today using their own cash might consider that as a commercial advantage (that said, it doesn’t really seem to be the case since I suspect more developers would have done it if they thought it would impact their sales if they didn’t)

    But developers that current have scanned tracks may not be too happy if and when everyone gets access to the similar (or better) scan data from, say, Silverstone’s IP department.

    I think it’s a bit of a gimmick though. As others have said having a really accurate track data is neither here nor there unless you have really accurate physics to go with it.

    Track scans probably don’t stay accurate for that long either.

  • Matt Orr

    iRacing’s Interlagos was purchased as they couldn’t get the scanners into Brazil. They purchased it from the same guys who sell it to F1 teams, it’s pretty much a certainty that scanning it for iRacing would have been cheaper had they done it themselves. Granted, iR has scanned plenty of tracks by now to minimize the cost of the equipment in the first place.

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