First of all, I’m glad we can speak. It was impossible to contact you through Patreon – there is no facility to do so unless one pays you. This is a significant barrier for anyone who needs to contact you to clear anything up, so fix this.
If you are serious about maintaining a good reputation may I suggest that a little bit more work goes into:
- Making yourself openly accessible / contactable
- Checking and attributing sources
- Clarifying your workflow
With that in mind, let me point out a few things that are difficult to reconcile between what you wrote here (Eg:“At no point did I say the model was mine, or even offer it to anyone.”), and on the Patreon page from my point of view:
The blurb on Patreon states (in part) - “I make top quality race cars for Assetto Corsa.[...] You can also request custom skins, interiors and even Cars!”
These are the terms they are signing up to:
Tier 1 “Crew members will receive early access to cars as well as general support for any mods.”
Tier 2 “[..]Digital downloads, Early access[..]”
My model was on a Patreon page where the description under the render states:
“Some initial work has began as I really want to bring this car fully into the game at some point. It as many errors and issue at present including no uvmaps but the model itself is of good quality. A definite future release.”
The reason people pay you is to get access to the cars being advertised on the Patreon page – there is no reason to show people cars on a page asking for money, unless they are there to be sold access to. If you are not aware of it, you are actually entering a legally binding contract with people. I suggest you read up about it, I know Patreon take this seriously.
These descriptions are ambiguous at best, and actually read like you are creating the cars.
My model was ripped – it was NOT downloadable or freely available. Whether you, or a contact of yours did this is not really the issue, you bear responsibility for it by advertising it on your Patreon. I hope this is clear, and that we can all take the opportunity to do better from this.
I know now from my side that it is reckless to consider it safe to have any kind of 3D up online, even if it is ring-fenced.
I’m glad that you seem to be genuinely contributing to the community. We all have a shared passion – from that perspective, we definitely have common ground and I applaud any work that is a positive benefit to us all. I want to thank anyone who has been helpful in trying to get this issue resolved. I appreciate the help - more community spirit means more for us all to enjoy!
If anyone wants to know a bit about the car:
I have been very fortunate to get the assistance of a vehicle dynamicist based in Italy. He is able to cover the physics in a way that I would never be able to. He is also making a visit to the Alfa museum where the car is on display and attempting to establish contact with some of the original engineers to see if they would be willing to provide information.
We’re looking at the Group C regs and period class information to help with the development of the model.
It’s a learning curve for us, but an enjoyable one. The prospect of this beauty with the Ferrari Tipo V12 screaming down the Mulsanne is mouth watering and very motivational.
Hopefully we can give it a life that it never had…
If anyone has any information on anything related to the car or skills that they can contribute, please do get in touch.
u/zen_tm on reddit/GTP
