I plan to make my Falcon ute model totally from scratch - something I've never done before, and which fills me with trepidation and excitement in equal measure.
Is it within my abilities to do such a thing?
Damn right it is.
Looking at the pics I had available, I plotted out on paper a rough diagram of how I was going to turn this thing into a model. This involved sketching the shape of the vehicle, and drawing lines over the sketch that followed the lines and contours of the body. I joined these lines together to form a wireframe or mesh that I could refer to while building the model. This took me about an hour to do just the front half, but I found that taking the time to have a good long think about how the faces would fit together helped make the project much easier.
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I continued to sketch each part of the model as I built it, to keep tabs on vertex numbers and define face shapes and structures, so don't be surprised when I reference this sketch (and many others) later as the story unfolds.
I'm going to build one half of the model, and then mirror it, as this is the easiest way to build a complex, symmetrical model like a truck body.
The first thing you need before you can go creating faces out of nothing, is a texture file for those faces to be mapped to. I fired up PSP, created a 256x256 pixel image, filled it with red colour, and saved it as FalcAU1.raw (I'll be doing more work to this later to turn it into a proper a set of truck textures). I also saved the .PAL file (the palette or colour table, which holds the image colour information and is seperate from the .RAW image itself), and used MDMRE's utility to convert this into the .ACT format used by MTM2 and BINedit. I then loaded the texture file into BINedit's texture pool. Now we're ready to begin.
I started with the headlight, as the headlights of the AU Falcon have a very distinctive shape, and make a good place to start the model from.
Following my diagram, I added a vertex for the outside corner of the headlight, and three more forward and a little inside this one. I joined them together to make three triangular faces, then moved them around a little until they were more or less about where I wanted them, and spaced out enough that I wouldn't mix them up. Then I added four more vertices, joined them to the previous vertices with three rectangular faces, and moved these around as before. I repeated this until I had five sections to the headlight, each made of three faces.
I then moved the vertices around using X/Shift+X, Y/Shift+Y, Z/Shift+Z, and Ctrl+V to change the vertices' positions. I didn't worry about the overall dimensions of the model - I'll resize it to more real-life dimensions when I've finished - but I did take great pains to make sure that it had the right relative shape.
It looks a fairly simple model but this actually took me hours to finish, as it was quite hard to produce a (pseudo-)curved surface using these flat faces, and I was taking great pains to make sure I accurately reproduced the shape of the real thing. It pays to be meticulous with the construction of these things - as I was going to be building off it, any inconsistencies or blemishes would affect the rest of the model.
Next I added 10 more vertices to plot out the front grille, joined them up with faces, and moved the vertices around as before until I was satisfied with their positions. You'll notice that the lines of the 'egg-crate' grille are reflected in the lines of the faces.
I moved the model so that the vertices that made up the inside edge of the grille were on an x-coordinate of 0, and saved the model. I then mirrored the model - this gave me the light and grille for the other side - and inserted it onto itself to check that the width was accurate.
At first I found that it was too wide, so I re-opened the original model and made the necessary changes, then saved, mirrored and inserted it again to check the width. I didn't save it like this, as I'd be stuck deleting one half of it before I could continue building.
The next stage was to add the bonnet and fender. After plotting out how many 'segments' I would need for the wheel well, I then added another bunch of verts in two lines stretching from the headlight, and merging into one vertex at the far end, and attached faces to them. For a line of reference I kept one row of vertices on the same x-coordinate - this is the line made by where the hood meets the fender. Again I moved the vertices around until I was happy with the shape formed by the faces. This was a little abstract as I was trying to visualise the length of the bonnet and keep it in proportion to the rest of the model, and I hadn't built a great deal of the vehicle (a headlight and half the grille, hmmm...) to accurately reference from yet. So, sorting the positions of these vertices was a bit of guesswork, but I could always move them later so I just set them to approximate locations.
The next step was the bonnet itself. I added in even more vertices, in line with those that made up the grille, and added faces using them, then as before moved them around to form the bonnet. I paid careful attention to replicating the curves, especially the raised area leading to the headlights and the ridge that runs down the middle, and finished with the gap where the bonnet meets the windshield.
Now to add the fender. You know how I'm doing it by now...
Notice how I've fastidiously reproduced the lines and swells of the real thing, by modelling on the funny ridge that runs down the side of the body.
Next I added more faces to form the rest of the fender and the wheelwell. At this stage I also went back over the entire model, moving most of the vertices on the fender and bonnet to produce a more pronounced curve around the side of the model.
To check over my handiwork, I mirrored the model and joined the two halves together again just to see how it looked so far. Note that I saved the half-model first, and that mirroring at this stage was for inspection purposes only (ie not to be saved in this form!).
Finally, to complete the forward section of the ute I plotted out and added vertices and faces to form the front bumper. After careful positioning to form the bumper complete with smily "mouth", I sat back and admired my work.
Then, to get a preview of my handiwork, I mirrored the model and inserted it onto itself to see what the completed front section would look like.
Oh dear.
Because I was only building one half of the body, I was having trouble trying to gauge the correct size and scale of the parts as I was building. It is only now, when I pieced the two relatively complete halves together, that the extent of this became apparent. My model had come out looking a little too wide and short, with the headlights and grille looking relatively too large for the rest of the model! Although I expected it might require some adjustment, I was shocked to find out how far off the mark I really was!
The fact that I had painstakingly moved the vertices to what I thought were the best positions to reproduce the shapes I wanted was a real bummer. Now I had to go back and do it all again! Oh woe!
You may well be reading this and shaking your head, annoyed that I'm raving about how terrible this model has come out when it is in fact quite impressive. But the truth is if something is worth doing, then it is worth doing right. To be fair, the problem isn't that bad; it just needs a bit of tweaking to get it perfect.
At this point I got called away from working on this model by the pressures of real life, but it never completely left my mind. After many months of mulling over the problem and further studying any examples of the AU Falcon I could find, I got back to it and gave it a major overhaul. I managed to find some side-on photographs of the ute which helped a great deal when I came to redefining the shape of the body, and also did some new sketches examining the shapes of the vehicle.
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As you can see, virtually every vertex has been moved from it's original position - the model now looks vastly different to, but much better than, what I'd started out with.
At last I was more or less satisfied with how the model looked. So how many vertices and faces does this model have? Tapping the I key revealed 322 vertices and 278 faces for the two joined halves (without vertex merging) - eek! No wonder it seems a complex model - it is! I wanted to keep below the limit of 1000 vertices, but with a third of those already spent on the sculpted front end it's obvious I'd need to be more frugal with them to acheive this!