MTM2.com

The topic is truck frames.

The questions are:

• how do you decide what frame design is best for a particular truck
• how do you map them - special textures or all to a small spot on a texture
• got any tips for fit
• how do you get your shocks to line up - trial and error or something more precise

Please be as thorough or scant as you like.

Thanks.

What looks best it totally up to you if your making a Custom. I myself, depends on what I'm making... if I'm making a fairly stock looking truck, and I want it to stay that way, if the real truck had leaf springs on it from the factory, I use my old reliable setup of leafs. If it has leafs, then it has the shocks that a normal everyday car would have, how many is up to you. I use the same leafs on every truck. I use the same axles on almost every leaf truck. They have the shock bodies already mounted on them. I center the leafs and shackles in the fenderwells. Then I center my pre-set shock rods in the leafs. They should touch the frame, and shouldn't hang any lower than the leaf droop. Then open the whole truck in Binedit, axles and wheels and all, and then just keep moving them bit by bit in the .trk file, till they are centered within the shock bodies on the axles. I set the gap between the tires and the shocks in the .trk file too. Perfect.

My leafs I almost always paint black. So I select all my faces and map the black areas and the other suspension parts, to the actual truck body files, that I have pre-painted before I started. Now I have redone my leafs and added some painted detail to them, in that case I just make a new texture and name it like #3 or whatever, to go with the normal body textures. Then just use that same texture or 2 for the whole suspension, and use the texture replacer, and rename them accordingly for each truck. Nothing changes that way, and I only had to map it all once, makes it much easier.

If I use a custom tube frame I just move it around till it looks the best, under the body, and make it as tall as I have to depending on radical I want it to look. I like my tube chassis Customs to be the maximum in height. I like em to have huge ground clearance. The axle bars in the trk file can go a max height of 2.000000, so I raise them to that, and then move the body around in BE, then go check it in Tracked2 untill they touch the frame. The normal Monster Truck style shocks are used on tube trucks, like the stock truck setups, and are the norm on the real trucks of today. Same thing though, center them in the wheel openings, and make them as tall as you like and then just adjust the wheelbase in the trk file, till they are centered up nice in the shock bodies. I set my shock bodies in till they look good, then save them as a seperate model, and the main truck body as another. Then I can move things around till I like the way it looks, the rest is all just setup in the trk file for looks. Then I set the axlebars and driveshafts accordingly in the trk file too, and look at it in Tracked2 to see how it looks..

I usually make my bodies a certain length depending on the truck, but 90% of mine are the same, that way all my trucks stay the same in handling. If you keep everything pretty close from truck to truck, they will always handle as great as the first one. I won't give away my wheelbase specs and such type secrets, but anyone can look in any of my trk files and see that they are generally all the same settings.

As long as I keep the same wheelbases and body positions, you can put the axlebar and driveshaft positions any place you want, they don't affect handling. The width of the wheels from center, and body position, and wheelbase are the determining factors in how a truck handles.

Hope that helps ya out some.

how do you decide what frame design is best for a particular truck?

If it's supposed to be a steel body (like Bigfoot-1) or a similar custom, then I will make a basic box-tube frame. The steel body's at my scrapyard will get a box frame as well. Many musclecar conversions from NFS and evo can use these too.

My detailed tube-frames for fiberglas body's originate from one of my replica frames, such as Eradicator or Gravedigger. From there I will modify & resize the base frame to suit the size of the body, then build a new cage and upper framework to fit it properly. Even my 2-engine sidewinder frame originated as a digger frame....I made those frames from several photos, so I know the tube positions are correct for a PATRICK-style frame. A few of my frames are custom-made, using Patrick-styling cues...

I use the patrick design on newer trucks because they are one of the best frame designs for racing monsters...light and stiff, and very vulnerable to re-design to suit a unique application.

Care must be taken to keep the frame size narrow enough to fit it between the shocks .....4 feet wide above the axles is a good starting point...the rest of the frame can be wider (such as the cage)


how do you map them - special textures or all to a small spot on a texture?

Normally I will map it all to one point on a texture, but for lighter color frames like Digger's, I have on rare occasion used SELECT BY FACING to select just the top or bottom of the frame tubes (up to a 33 degree angle), and map them to lighter or darker colors respectively.

My scrapyard frames are usually mapped to a tiny colored box on a texture file to make frame-color changes easier, by simply changing the color of the box.


got any tips for fit?

Trial and error is all I use....keep a set of properly located shock models handy, and insert them temporarily to see if the frame is narrow enough to clear them, but not too narrow. Always keep the models like frame, shocks, etc separate from each other, in case you want to re-fit or relocate something, or to reuse it later down the road on some future project.

how do you get your shocks to line up - trial and error or something more precise?

It's a move-check-move-check-move process.... 535 units from shock centerline to frame centerline works for the X-axis parameters...Z-position will be determined by axle position.....that position was determined earlier during a fitting of the tires to the body wheel openings. Once the Z-axis position is found to suit the body, the TRK file is saved and set aside.

Once I have the Z position (fore-aft) of the axles determined in the TRK file, then I will load just the SHOCK models alone into TRACKED2, and check their location to the 2D shock struts (the 2D struts located by the wheels and axles)...

....then I make any needed changes in front-back location of the shock models in BINEDIT and load the shocks into Tracked2 again to inspect...repeat until satisfied.

Use SAVE VERTIX GROUP to save separate groups of the front and rear shocks so you can reposition them along the Z-axis independently for quicker relocation.