Now I dunno about you, but that front bumper bar just isn't "me". Let's get something more stylish and fitting fixed there instead.
First, we need to delete the existing bumper by pressing Spacebar to cycle through the faces of the model. When we get to one that we want to delete, press Ctrl+X to delete it.
You can see that BINedit is still displaying the vertices that those faces were once attached to. Now that all the faces have been removed, we need to select Vertex -> Delete All Unused... to delete all the vertices left over from deleting those faces. I'll save this model to a different name (VANdal_1.bin) in case we decide that we want that bumper back after all.
Now I am going to get the bumper I want off a truck I have been playing around with for a while - a revamped version of my Flying Falcon replica. I've been working on this on and off for a while, improving it since I first released it way back in 1999, incorporating what I've learn since then into it. But things being what they are, I have no idea when I'll be finishing it.
Enough nostalgia - I'm here to get a part. One of the recent additions I made to this model (that I'm very proud of) is a new front bumper with a deeper chin that's more like the real thing. I'm going to borrow this front bumper and modify it to fit my van.
First I have to delete the rest of the truck, then delete all unused vertices. Now I'll save this bumper as vandal_bumper.bin.
Now, this bumper is mapped to this texture, FlyFalc2.raw:
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I am going to move the section of texture that this model is mapped to one of my VANdal textures - exactly the same procedure as I did for the exhaust pipes. Hmm, VANdal1.raw has a big chunk of empty, black space in it; I'll paste it there.
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Now I just need to repaint it to match the rest of the van. I decided to keep the same shape for the bumper's air intakes etc. and just paint it in the appropriate colours.
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Now I can reduce the colour depth back down, save the texture and .PAL files, convert the .ACT, and so on just as I did before.
Now I have to remap the bumper to VANdal1.raw. The first time around I did this (when I'd just put it on FlyFalc.bin), I found it was quite difficult to map because of its shape - the mesh appears as from above rather than from the front in the mapping window, which means that I have to rearrange the mesh there before I can map it. Because of this, I decided that it might be easier to map it in sections.
First I used Model -> Normalise Texture to transfer all texture mapping on the bumper model to VANdal1.raw - this would ensure that I didn't leave any faces still mapped to FlyFalc2.raw by mistake. Then I tagged all the faces along the top of the bumper, saved them as a face group, and mapped them to the small white rectangle I'd drawn next to the bumper on VANdal1.raw.
Then I had to map the rest of the faces - the front of the bumper, and along the lower edge. Now if you selected all the remaining faces and entered the texture mapper, you'd find that BINedit has drawn the mesh as if from a top-down perspective - the same as the depiction the editor gives you in the lower left quadrant (Y view). This means that you have to unravel the mesh before you can map it - not much fun! This occurs because of the curve in the model - if you select groups of faces that are all facing the same direction (making a more or less flat surface) you won't have this sort of problem. So, I'm going to do the rest of it into the three sides for mapping.
First, I'll use BINedit's Select By Facing function to select all the forward-facing faces on the bumper, and leave those on the sides and top unselected. I go into Face -> Select By Facing..., and get the following window:
This selects the faces I want without needing to manually tag individual faces:
I save this face group as "bumper front". Now I can map those faces to the middle of the bumper texture:
Easy innit? All I had to do was repeat the above procedure for the two sides of the bumper.
To finish off, I used Vertex -> Select All Vertices to tag all the vertices on the model, and stored them as vertex group "bumper". Then I saved the model.
Now, I inserted my bumperless VANdal model, and used the vertex group I had stored to move the bumper into position.
Now clearly the bumper doesn't fit, so I'll have to do some further modifications to it. I cycled through the vertices until I got to one that I wanted to move, then used the keyboard commands X/Shift+X, Y/Shift+Y, and Z/Shift+Z, plus Vertex -> Set Coordinates... to move them to new positions.
What I have been trying to do is reshape the bumper so that it fits the front of the van, and also to move the vertices close enough together that I can carry out the Merge Close Vertices operation to join the two models (van and bumper) together. First I'll save the model in case vertices that I do not want merged together end up getting merged.
Since I've been moving the vertices with 10 unit increments using the keyboard commands X/Shift+X, Y/Shift+Y, and Z/Shift+Z, I think 10 units should be close enough to merge the verts along the top of the bumper with those on the front of the van.
Hey presto, job's a good 'un.
Now we need to add faces to the back of the bumper bar, since in its current state, if you get behind the van you can see straight through it. By cycling through the vertices and taking note of their numbers, I was able to draw a diagram similar to below:
This represents a view from under the van. The existing faces have been drawn in black, and the faces to be added have been drawn in red. Vertices are shown as orange dots, the blue numbers being the number of the vertex. I've also labelled parts of the diagram to make it easier to understand what parts of the model they represent: so the bottom of the van forms a rectangle with the corners at vertex numbers 85 and 82, while the bottom edge of the bumper forms a curve with the numbers 22, 24, 26, 27, 25, 23, and 21. So to fill in the bottom of the model, I need to add faces whose corners are defined by those vertices in clockwise order (eg. 22, 24, 85; 24, 26, 85; and so on). The areas labelled "wheel well" are exisiting faces on the side of the model: they wouldn't normally be visible here, but I've splayed the diagram out a bit so we can see them. The areas marked "wheel arch" are those faces under the curve of the wheel well: I need to add one face on either side to cover the back of the bumper.
There! Now we have a bunch of faces under the bumper that prevent it from being invisible from one side. The new faces have been mapped to the entirety of the first texture in the texture pool. All they need now is mapping to an appropriate part of a texture.
The new faces have been put at the back of the "queue" - they've been assigned numbers after all the other faces on the model. By pressing Spacebar, I'd have to cycle through every other face on the model before I got to them - but there's an easier way. Starting at no selected faces (ie. -1), I press Shift+Space to cycle backwards through the faces, which puts me on the last face on the model - which is the last face I just added. Pressing Shift+Space to cycle backwards through the rest of the faces allows me to go through all the faces I've just added, and I can hit F to tag those faces as I go. I'll save this face group and map it to a black part of a texture, like I did for the insides of the exhaust pipes.
Now we've got a good-looking bumper on our van.
I'm quite happy with how it's turned out, so I'll overwrite my VANdal.bin model and discard the temporary VANdal_1.bin.