With the front end done, it was time to start on the cab, and then to build in the bed of the truck.
First I sketched out the lines and shapes of the cab and door, then drew in lines for the faces, and finally noted down the vertex numbers as I built it.
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First came the windshield. The Falcon has a rather severe rake angle on its windshield, which I attempted to reproduce as closely as possible - perhaps a little pointless since I'd likely be modifying it once the rest of the cab was built anyway...
Next I added in the roof, positioning the vertices to roughly represent the shape of the real thing, and then added a further line of faces for the A-pillar and doorframe.
From here the addition of the window went swimmingly easily. Note how the faces have been constructed such that a line is formed that runs along where the B-pillar (and the rear end of the door) would be.
Next came a rather more complex part. On the utility, the ridge that runs along the side of the body curves around the back of the window (on the Falcon sedan and wagon models, this ridge runs horizontally along the length of the car). This calls for some tricky shapes to achieve the effect of the ridge merging into the side of the body. It looks a bit wonky at the moment but I'll be tidying up the entire cab section in a moment.
Finally I added the rest of the door and cab body, again forming the lines of the door and rear of the cab.
Next I spent a bit of time fiddling with the positions of the vertices, until I was happy with the size of the cab and the shapes of the window, windshield and roofline. Notice the slant on the A-pillars in the rear view.
Now I just needed to add the rear window to the cab, and the cab section was complete. I concentrated on using as few vertices as possible here; first I added several vertices to form the line of the rear window, then I built the window using only a couple of vertices and some big faces.
Joined together, the two halves look like this. A count of 474 vertices (without vertex merging) and 444 faces is encouraging - it appears I may not run out of vertices on this model after all.
Now, all I need to build is the bed section, and my model will be complete. After spending a short while sketching this section and considering how I was going to set about it, I got started on the side of the bed.
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First I concentrated on building the indented section at the top which is where the hooks for the tonneau cover are located. Although it stretches almost the entire length of the bed, I kept this bit relatively short for the time being while I was working on it, so I could better see what I was working on - I'll stretch it out to cover the proper length later. The ridge was made in a similar way to the ridges I had already built on the truck.
Next came the faces that make up the side of the truck. After a bit of stretching and reshaping I had something that was starting to look good...
A few more faces formed the rear taillight and bumper.
Finally, I could build in the tailgate. The indents and ridges are a recurring theme on this vehicle: the last one is on the tailgate itself.
Some quick sketching and a bit of work reproduced this as nicely as the rest of the truck.
Now all along I've been working on the side and rear of this vehicle, it's been on the dark side because the illuminating source in BINedit is non-adjustable - one side is always in shadow and the other is brightly lit. By rotating the entire model 180 degrees about the Y-axis and reloading it, I could at last cast some light on my work and check the contours and the angles of the faces. (In fact the way it casts light on the faces looks rather better with it this way around - wish I'd tried it out earlier!).
After a bit of tweaking and smoothing out the bumps, I had something that I thought looked pretty darn good :)
To finish the truck off, I rotated it back around and added the tonneau cover to the tray.
The final count for this half of the truck was 314 vertices 308 faces - with vertex merging, the two halves should amount to less than 600 vertices. Which is nice, as I wanted to keep below 1000 vertices for the completed truck :)
Of course, being the perfectionist that I am meant that I couldn't leave it there - even at this stage I still felt I needed to give the model as a whole a few final tweaks to make it perfect. To make it easier to work with, I separated the front end from the cab and rear and saved them as seperate models so I could modify each section independently and then merge them together again. To do this I simply deleted the faces that made up the cab and rear of the model so all i was left with was the front, deleted the unused vertices, then saved this to a different name. Then I reopened my original model and repeated the process to remove the front. I also rotated the model 180 degrees about the Y axis to bring the model onto the sunward side again, so I could better see the shapes of the faces. This made it much easier to see what I was doing to the model in the side, top and rear wireframe views. Now I could tweak away without so much guesswork, as I could actually see what was happening.
After modifying the depth of the model, I used BINedit's Resize function on the cab/rear section to make it a little longer. This made it a little hard to match the front back onto the forward cab because the vertices had moved - but it achieved the results I wanted so I didn't mind the extra work involved in realigning the vertices for it to fit back together seamlessly.
At long last I was satisfied with the model - there's still a lot to do, but I was pleased that it was looking exceptionally good thus far.