Paul Jeffrey
Premium
In our quest to sample some of the best sim racing mods available today, we have a look at the rather epic Alzen Motorsport Porsche 996 "Turbinchen" for Assetto Corsa....
The 996 by Matthias Neelen is a car rather unlike any other in Assetto Corsa, and as such it offers a very satisfying experience for those drivers looking to have a bit of a wild ride.... something that is becoming all too rare in the modern age of GT3 and endurance competition in sim racing of late.
Developed and improved upon over a number of years, this excellent mod does wonders to defy the original age of the 3D model and relative inexperience of the mod author, easily finding itself as one of the 'go to' cars for any serious sim racing enthusiast.
You can download the Alzen Porsche 996 Biturbo "Turbinchen" v4.0 Here.
Having started out life very much as a learning project, over time the 996 has continued to grow thanks to a relentless effort from Matthias, now standing proud as a highly polished and very impressive car that is highly likely to put a smile on your face (and plenty of frustration too!).
Here's what creator Matthias Neelen had to say about the mod:
Well, why this car? I guess this car was my transition from seeing car races as a whole to recognizing individual cars and the technology involved …the 2005 VLN 24h was the first 24h Nürburgring race I followed, just by stumbling upon a training session on TV. And with it the impressions of this car growling by, a street car based build spanking works efforts from Opel (DTM Astra), Dodge (Viper GTS-R), BMW (M3 GTR) and Audi (DTM TT) left and right sorta burned itself into my 17-year old brain. Yes the car failed hard in the main race and only made it to 10th with some 13 laps behind the leader Opel, but it founded my passion for race car tech and especially my love for oddball cars.
Why did I do it for AC? I don’t remember really what sparked me downloading Blender and extruding the first vertices. I did play around with modifying other mod cars, but this “996 Turbinchen” idea sorta stuck and by summer 2014 I dared opening a “WIP thread” over on the Kunos forums, where it was one among dozens of people that did the same.
If you take me starting with Blender at all as the start, it took from around April 2014 till March 2015, when I released a first “Beta”, and the 1.0 Release here on RaceDepartment happened in June 2016. So around two years. But I didn’t treat it like a job, it was and still is just a hobby I like spending my time on instead of watching the 53rd repeat of Big Bang Theory or whatever show of choice, I didn’t note the hours, some days it was 10 minutes, some it was 5 hours while watching/listening to totally unrelated Twitch streams, sometimes I spend weeks doing nothing on it with my wheel collecting dust as well. I studied engineering, I’m certified in CAD on PTC and Dassault products, but this did not help one bit with polygon modelling and texturing. Probably didn’t help either that with Gimp and Blender I chose two programs renowned for their unfriendly UI. But both programs are free and offer just as much or even more and better features as the go-to payware tools.
For data I used whatever I could get my hands on. Magazine articles, race report snippets from YouTube, setup sheets of 996 Cup cars, tests of the 996 Turbo roadcar. The contact with the race team you talked about so heroically in the video, it really wasn’t. I wrote an email with a few bullet points, and I got that same email back, with Jürgen Alzen having added whatever info he could still find between my lines. Both of us did not spend more than 10 minutes each on those emails. It’s no magic, and the guys in those race teams are just enthusiasts like us… with more money and more reality of course!
Building the car was also absolutely impossible without all the brilliant minds on the forums, again offering their help and “wisdom” for free. Guys like aphidgod, Stereo, Patrick Marek, mclarenf1papa, Dauntless/Hyperactive (with whom I sadly had a little falling out after the Kunos mod forums shut down) people that (sometimes with a little persuasion) helped a noob like me along and answered even the most stupidest questions...
Then you had people doing the car skins, which I can do, but don’t really like doing. Sound was done partly by me and partly by Fonsecker, who is now doing that same thing for Studio 397 for RFactor 2. Just don’t get tangled up in dependencies, I always wanted to understand how everything was working instead of totally relaying on others.
Regarding what gives me pride now looking back on the build, it sorta “grew along” Assetto Corsa as a whole. I’ve just reread a little into the original thread and found again that AC did not even have AWD when I started, that only came with the Alfa 155 DTM car. I kept coming back to it with new stuff I learned and that AC “learned”, it got better Shaders and better meshes over time as I improved with my other main projects, physics updates as they got introduced to AC through patches, like the AWD2 code with the Skylines. For quite a while after the 2.9 release I kept these latest updates for myself and mostly ran the car as part of AI grids on the Nordschleife, with me driving other cars. With ACC looming on the horizon I did have “Farewell updates” in mind for both the 996 and the Audi, but it was the “AC Custom Shaders” mod by x4fab and henter that again prompted initiative.
The 996s cockpit looked bad at night, so I updated it. Brake glow wasn’t quite there yet, so I tinkered with it. Suddenly we had rain, the car had a wiper, but with no animation yet, so I made one. While I was at it animating, I remade the driver shift animation with a rig I had made for the KRB Audi and added the H-gated shifter system I found while doing the Glas Exorod.
Then came along info about a “secret” suspension type in AC that only like a dozen people knew about and that no released mod uses so far .. guess it clear that it is some sort of iterative process that does not follow strict plans, other creators influence me, all my mods influence each other, probably a bit like painting, or maybe like a musician, who keeps playing with what he has already, adding verses and chords, and at some point may starts thinking “I could release this”.
With this car I don’t have plans, despite all the updates above the main model itself is simply too old now, if I’d want to do stuff like add working doors it be easier to redo the whole outer shell than work with the existing mesh, meaning all skins would need to be redone and so on. It was a learner piece, and it looks bad ..hell I did like a third of it before I even learned about the “Bevel” tool… I placed curves vertex by vertex ...and a Porsche has lots of curves...
I’m happy that I came along at the right time to be part of this mod community, and I wonder if it will ever be as creative and fertile as it has been with Assetto Corsa “1”. In 2014 and 2015 “we all” started out from down low and learned alongside each other in the sandbox Kunos provided us with and carried this passion onto RD and into the world. I came from ~7 years of “consumer simracing” in the form of Life for Speed, as someone using and driving what we were given by its Devs (and a little modding like skins and a few texture edits), and then became a content creator with AC.
If someone is pondering about starting to mod now it’s probably hard, with the established “unreachable” crowd on one side and the endless wasteland of ripped blingy “facebook mods” on the other. I’d still say just start your project and let us take part in it. We don’t bite...as long as you don’t try to pass of a Forza model as your own 
Available to download HERE, this is most certainly one very fine example of an ever improving car mod in AC. Developed as something of a labour of love, the wild but wonderful "Turbinchen" is an incredible testament to what is possible when one has a handful of talent, plenty of patience and a desire to make something excellent...
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So then, what do you think of it? Leave a comment below!
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