Let's add some nice, big exhaust pipes to give our van some nice vocals d:-)
I originally made these models for one of my other truck projects, Urban Myth. I saved them as a seperate entity and offered them as a downloadable part for other people to add to their own trucks. They are mapped to the bottom-left of this texture, UrbMyth1.raw:
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Unusally for a stock truck, Boogey Van's textures (and hence our van's textures) have a bit of empty space on them. So, rather than include an extra texture, I am going to import the section from the UrbMyth1.raw texture that the pipes are mapped to onto the VANdal2.raw texture.
To do this I had to increase the colour depth on VANdal2.raw to 16 million again, then copy the section from UrbMyth1.raw and then paste it onto VANdal2.raw. I think it fits nicely right about there:
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Then I reduced it's colour depth back down to 256 colours again to save it and its .PAL file, and finally reconvert the .ACT so I can view the truck in BINedit again. Note that you usually have to close BINedit and then restart it so that it will load the updated textures and not just pull the old ones out of its texture pool.
I selected Textures -> Load... and loaded my updated textures. Now I cycled through the faces on the pipes and tagged all the faces on the inside of both, saved the face group as "inside pipes", then selected Face -> Deselect All Faces to clear the face selection. Then I cycled through and tagged all the faces on the outside of the right pipe, saved it as "outside right pipe", cleared the selection again and repeated for the left pipe, saving that face group as "outside left pipe".
Now the insides of the pipes are mapped to black, but the outsides are mapped to the silver blend that I had just copied onto VANdal2.raw. I mapped the insides to a black space on VANdal2.raw where they'd be out of the way, and the outsides to the silver blend.
This left the exhaust pipes looking exactly the same - which was what I wanted. I'd just mapped them to a different texture that was already in use on my truck.
Now I wanted to tag some vertices. I'd already saved some vertex groups when I made the pipes: all the vertices on both pipes, plus all the vertices on the right pipe. I was going to change the length of the pipes so I wanted to tag the verts on the forward ends of them.
I saved this vertex group as "pipes front ends". Then I saved the pipes model themselves as Vandal_exhpipes.bin.
Now, I selected File -> Insert... and selected my Vandal.bin model. BINedit loaded it into the current model (the pipes).
The pipes themselves are only visible in the wireframe views. It can be seen in the Z view that, conveniently, they were just the right horizontal distance apart (highlighted with arrows on the pic) - but they were nowhere near the right vertical position, and sitting at the middle of the truck, having been centred on all axes (highlighted with a circle on the pic).
Now I needed to move them to where I wanted them. I selected Groups -> Restore Vertex Group... and restored the vertex group "both pipes". Now I went into Model -> Translate... so I could move the pipes to where I wanted them.
I only wanted to move the pipes up (positive along the Y axis) and backward (negative along the Z axis). Note the "Translate only selected vertices" radio button - you must have this selected or you'll translate the entire model and not just the exhaust pipes! I typed in some numbers that I felt were close to being right (with practice you'll learn to get a feel for what values you need to enter) and clicked Ok.
That moved it quite close to where I wanted them. By calling Translate again and entering some more values I was able to move them closer again. I kept doing this, entering smaller and smaller values, until I had the pipes right where I wanted them.
Now I wanted to extend the pipes to reach right the way across under the wheel wells. I restored my previous "pipes frontends" vertex group and used the same Translate function to move them forward.
But why stop there? Let's have not two but FOUR exhaust pipes out the back of this van! I selected File -> Insert... and inserted vandal_exhpipes.bin. They appeared in exactly the same place as the first pair of exhaust pipes, so I would have to do the same procedure to move them to the correct positions.
I went into Groups -> Restore Vertex Group... and was greeted by the familar window again, only this time there were two sets of exhaust pipe vertex groups.
The groups belonging to the set of pipes I had just inserted had had [1] placed after them by BINedit, as there was already a set of vertex groups with the same names loaded (subsequent insertions of the same models would get [2], [3], [4]... etc placed after them). So to move the pipes, I needed to load the vertex group "both pipes[1]", and to stretch them to the right length I needed to load "pipes frontends[1]".
After moving the new pipes into position, I then saved my model.
We now have a set of some nice, big exhaust pipes on our van!