“The Famous F40” Vector Illustration | Hacker News Reader

“The Famous F40” Vector Illustration

blog.gingerbeardman.com

162 pointsmsephton56 comments

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, bézier 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!

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...

"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."

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.

Would also love to know this! Cars today seem less daring in terms of design, at least to my 40-something-year-old eyes.

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 Speírling, 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.

Lots of 20 somethings are dreaming about old Nissan GTRs, 1960s mustangs, Toyota Supras and so on.

Car culture is alive and well, but it isn't all dreaming about Lambos and Porsches. It is more nuanced and creative, with modified cars as an art form living a strong life.

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.

Very true, I still remember the thrill of seeing new exotic cars in Top Trumps card games, but having no way of finding more information about them at the time. 40 years later I can look them up instantly.

Many young people today seem to have a similar superficial knowledge of cars from computer games, but oddly little depth of knowledge about them other than their in-game dynamics.

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.

> I drew the F40 and the Porsche 959 so many times as a kid. And always terribly.

As a kid on my Atari 600 XL I realized by myself that I could buy graph paper / grid paper / coordinate paper at a shop near my house and came up with the idea to use a "glass" table (a table where the top is made of glass) and a lamp underneath the table, to then note the coordinates of the Porsche 959. I took a picture from a 959 from one of the car magazine I found and meticulously wrote down the coordinates of the most important lines of the car so that I could then encode the coords on the Atari 600 XL.

I kept this graph paper with the 959 for a super long time and I'm so sad I eventually threw it away.

I'd do this kind of things while I was on vacation, far from my computer.

Strong The Duel: Test Drive II vibes in this post

That was the first computer game I played on my Atari ST back around 1989!

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... :)

WOW!

Sadly no MHD drive.

It looks like a good URL to submit. Do you want to post it?

Big son of a bitch!

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

I grew up with an F40 poster on my wall but the F50 still has my heart. The V12 soul in the F50 sings like few others can. Plus the looks, still timeless.

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.

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?

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...

Quite correct, I assumed too much about what Kimble was drawing from whilst at Ferrari. I stand corrected!

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.

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.

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...

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.

Thanks for the detailed insight! I'm sure you noticed that I took the easy way out in the blog post. :)

This only applies to the most common form of anti-aliasing, multisampling. There is also analytical anti-aliasing, which derives the pixel coverage directly from the equations of the shape (for vector graphics), see eg. the implementation in Skia [1], or for a classic, Wu's algorithm [2].

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17Gq-huAf9q7wA4MRfXwpi_bY... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaolin_Wu%27s_line_algorithm

The first illustration app I used that offered anti-aliasing was Xara Studio, which ran on very modest Windows PC hardware in 1995.

Originally it was called ArtWorks and ran on 8MHz Acorn Archimedes with 2MB RAMin 1992! I guess it used an anti-aliasing solution like this? http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/artworks.htm#:~:text=Art....

I’d also note that on the CRT monitors of the time, the stair-stepping of non-antialiased lines was not nearly as evident as on a modern, sharp LCD.

The embedded YouTube video is worth watching, at least for a minute to see the amount of detail in the file.

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.

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.

Man, Avara was so much fun back in the day for how simple it was...

Such memories rendering my vector illustrations in CorelDraw! They rendered like in the F40 video: object by object.

The only stuff like this I ever dealt with growing up was RIP / RIPscrip graphics... anyone else remember that, for BBS's?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyEj4Rm8mzE

I would love to see one of these done for the other famous F40 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_F40PH

All aboard the hype train!

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...

Probably because I live in Europe, but for me the Nort American trains are ugly as hell.

The earlier E- and F-units were much more conventionally attractive, especially in trains with a single "A" cab unit combined with cabless "B" units to form a sleek contiguous train: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_E-unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_F-unit

I agree that it does seem like the newer boxy aesthetic is trying to make a statement that train travel is for industrial goods only, not for people. Just why The Establishment would want to discourage cheap and easily-accessible passenger train travel in the late '60s and early '70s is left as an exercise for the reader: https://goldenstatswarrior.substack.com/p/the-great-migratio...

The large scrollable version appears blank in Firefox on MacOS.

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.

Fixed!

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…

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).

Thank you!

So there is no SVG port of this drawing?

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.

Opening the PDF with Adobe Illustrator and exporting as minified SVG yields a 4.6MB file for me that seems to display everything correctly, 4.4MB after svgo with default settings.

Great to hear. I don't have Illustrator or I would have tried it.

Imagine if Figma was this fast

Even if it was nobody would be coming across the source file on a dusty disk at the back of a drawer in thirty years.

I wish he put the other valves in, seeing a two valve head triggers me badly. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com