These screenshots show the whole truck as it appears in the TrackEd2 truck editor (faces set to MTM2 shiny type). Although the actual details are indistinct, you can see how the light is reflected nicely off the contours of the truck body.
It's a bit large and sitting a bit low relative to the wheels, so firstly I need to resize and position the body.
Dimensions are relative and generally only approximate in MTM2 (for a start TRI did not get the scale absolutely correct - Karmageddon tells me that where real monster truck wheels are 66 inch diameter, the ones in the game have a diameter of 6 feet, which is 72 inches). BINedit reports the size of my half-Falcon model as 19.5078125 feet long, 4.57421875 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide, meaning that both halves together will be exactly 7 feet wide. To get something to compare it to, I loaded the MTM2 Bigfoot .bin; this was 18.3984375 feet long, 8.390625 feet tall and 7.34375 feet wide.
I know that the Falcon has a load-carrying capacity similar to the American F-150, so the dimensions are probably comparable, although most vehicles here in Australia are of more modest dimensions than the monstrous crates they build in the US. The Bigfoot model is 8.4 feet tall due to the deep frame and undercarriage, which accounts for about 2/5 of the total height of the model; therefore, the height of the truck body itself is roughly 5 feet. In the end I settled on resizing my Falcon model with the width as 6 feet (3 for the half-model). Note the 'Keep Proportions' checkbox is checked - with this, BINedit automatically calculates the other two dimensions for you.
At any rate, I can look at it in-game or in TrackEd2 later on and make further adjustments then if I feel they are necessary.
Next, I have to get the truck body on a level comparable to other trucks. If you look at an MTM2 truck like Bigfoot, you should find that the vertices of the lower edge of the body have a y-coordinate of 0 - in other words, everything above 0 is the truck body, and everything below 0 is the frame and undercarriage; this is a nice convention arrived at by TRI, as it gives you a reference point for how your truck model will be inserted above the wheels. You can make use of this, by raising or lowering the model, to make your truck look higher or lower in the game.
I want my Falcon to sit a little lower than a standard MTM2 truck. Looking at one of the vertices on the bottom edge of the body, I found that it had a y value of -317. I used this information to raise the model 217 editor units, so that the lower edge of the body now sits at y coordinate -100.
Now I had a shell-type model of the body that was roughly positioned and sized correctly; it was time to build in the underside so that it would be a solid model. Sketches page 4 and page 5 correspond to what I'm doing here.
Again I split the model into two halves to make working on it easier. The first thing I did was to fill in the 'mouth' of the front bumper so you could no longer see through it and out the other side of the truck.
Next I added some vertices and faces to form the bottom of the front bumper. This involved noting down the coordinates of the existing vertices that formed the bottom edge of the front bumper and using these values to make a guesstimation of the best coordinates at which to add the new vertices. More faces will be attached to these vertices when I get to building the rest of the underside of the model.
Next on the menu was the wheel well. Again this involved noting the coordinates of those vertices that formed the wheel arch of the body and using these values when inserting the new vertices. I know from experience that having the back wall of the wheel well at an x-coordinate of approximately 500 yields the best results when dealing with MTM2 shock absorbers, as this is just deep enough to allow the placement of shock absorber models in the wheelwells. For this truck I used a number of x values, starting at 500 at the bottom of the wheelwell and moving outward to produce a shape that tapered slightly at the top. Probably such a thing will not be noticable in the game, but with the amount of work I've already put into this thing I'd be letting myself down if I didn't continue to be fancy in its construction :)
Another vertex or two and the faces to form the underside of the model, a few final tweaks and presto! All done.
Now I just had to repeat the process for the cab/bed part of the truck, making sure that the two halves would line up correctly so the excess vertices would be merged and none wasted.
First I added the wheelwell. This was done in exactly the same manner as the wheelwell I built on the front part of the model.
As before, I needed only a couple more vertices and a handful of faces to complete the underbody of my model. Now I have a complete solid truck model with lovely cut-out wheel wells (at least, I will as soon as I join the two halves back together again).
Time for some fun stuff. I added a mirror onto the side of the cab, using a mere 16 vertices. Getting it into exactly the right size and shape took some doing, but in the end this was a relatively simple and effective addition to my existing model.
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Next I wanted to build the Falcon 'sportsbar' rollbar; visible on the vehicle that I photographed at the FAI 1000 and started this tutorial with. I decided to build this as a seperate model to make it a little easier, and that I would insert it onto the body model and size it appropriately. I started with a new model, and built an octagonal tube type model. It has a diameter of approximately 0.21 feet. The plan was to insert this model onto itself several times at different angles to make the sportsbar.
I selected all the vertices on the model, and saved the vertex selection as "bar". This would allow me to easily move the model around once it had been inserted. Then I saved the model.
The idea was to start at the top of the bar, and work down, rotating the bar to be at the approximate angle required for that section: fine tuning would take place later. I rotated the bar -2 degrees about the Z-axis and then inserted it onto the original model. Using the vertex group that I had saved, I then moved it to join onto the end of the existing bar.
I then merged the joining vertices, and saved this model to a different name.
Now I reopened my bar model. As this was to be a short section, I resized it to be the same width as it's diameter, and rotated it -45 degrees about the z-axis. Then I inserted it onto the model I had thus far constructed and moved it to where I wanted it. The vertices required some moving around in order for them to be merged together effectively.
The next bar was rotated -60 degrees, inserted and positioned as above, and the vertices merged. Then the process was repeated for the final bar for this part of the sportsbar model. This one was shortened, and rotated -75 degrees.
Now to build the bar that comes off the main part. I opened my bar model and rotated it -90 degrees about the Y-axis. Since I would be using the model a few more times with it on this orientation, I saved it like this. Then I rotated it -15 degrees about the X-axis and 3 degrees back about the Y-axis to get it on the angle I desired. This was inserted onto the sportsbar model and positioned. I then spent some time mangling the model so that all the vertices could be merged where this bar joined the already-built section of the model. For a while it looked a bit messy, but it saved me the eight vertices from the end of the bar, and since the model was going to be mirrored, every vertex I saved would count double.
I added the bar twice more to finish the model, merging vertices as I went.
Now I needed to fine-tune it to fit the truck. I saved a number of useful vertex groups, then inserted it onto the body model. These vertex groups were useful in moving sections of the model around until it fit properly; by restoring different groups, I could easily translate them around to bend, stretch and scale the bars of the model.
I wanted to keep the sportsbar seperate from the truck itself, as it needed final tweaking (as usual... ;) , and as it isn't a standard feature, I won't be using it on all my trucks, so it would be more convient it keep it as an add-on. I removed the truck body by deleting the faces and attendant vertices, so that I was left with the sportsbar itself, and saved it.
A few tweaks and I was happy with it. All that remained now was to mirror it and join the two halves togethers, and viola! I now had a nice sportsbar that was sized, shaped and positioned to fit onto the back of my Falcon ute model.
The only niggling problem is a lack of pretty textures on either this or the ute model. So the next step is to rectify this.
Recall that the first thing I did with the model, before the first vertex was even positioned, was to create a texture file FalcAU1.raw. At the time I just painted this texture a flat red. Well, now is the time to make said texture file, and two more named FalcAU2.raw and FalcAU3.raw, worthy of their name.
Here's a tip; when making your own texture files, you can use the BINedit wireframe views of the model (and maybe even the 3D-view) in making templates on which to draw. For example, by taking a screenshot of my BINedit screen, I can copy and paste the side-on view onto my texture image, and then paint over the top of this. When I'm done, I'll have a texture that is perfectly shaped to fit my model when I map it.
The mapping window itself can also be useful in plotting out your textures - although it's harder to get the scale absolutely right, what you end up with is a more accurate representation of how the vertex mesh will be drawn in the mapping window.
After some time I finished with the image files shown below. These are actually the second version of my texture files; the first versions were nearly completed, but were lost when the Win95 memory manager screwed up in spectactular fashion, causing my Paint Shop Pro 4 program to crash in a most inelegant manner. Guess who hadn't saved his work in progress? So I had to do them all over again, and they probably came out a little better than the first time around, but all the same, losing the first set was still a setback that took some getting over...
These aren't the final versions of the textures; I decided I would leave the wireframe structure visible for the time being so that I could accurately map the model to the textures. The wireframe provides reference points for the mapping of the vertex mesh; once the model is mapped I will go back over the textures and make them look good n' proper. In most cases I modified the wireframe so that bits of the truck that are curved on the model have been flattened out on the textures (the front bumper is an example).
The textures for my Falcon ute are spread over three 256x256 .RAW texture files, FalcAU1.raw, FalcAU2.raw, and FalcAU3.raw. I tried to catagorise the sections so that related bits are on the same texture. So, the first file contains the textures for the front end of the truck, including headlight texture (copy-and-pasted direct from a photographic image), bumper, bonnet and windshield. The second file contains the sides of the cab, roof and mirror, plus a silver-blend bit which I copied from a different file (the sportsbar and mirror glass will be mapped to this). The final file contains the sides of the bed, tailgate, bed cover and the underside of the truck. Some texture files still have room left over on them, and this may yet be filled as I have yet to add a frame or shocks to the model, for example.
Note that you could do some symmetrical sections on the textures, such as the windshield, as one half instead of having the whole thing there. This way, you'd map the texture once on your half-model, and then when you mirrored it to get the other side of the model, it would already be mapped (to that same part of the texture). However, I wanted to leave provision for putting words or logos across the windshield and rear window etc, so drew both sides of them (and will have to map the model accordingly). I did however only draw one half for the underside of the truck on the third texture, because it wouldn't matter if what was on one side of the truck was the mirror of the opposite side since I wouldn't be drawing or writing on the underside.
This is how the model looks at the moment. When I was building the model, any new faces were mapped to the entirety of the first texture in the texture pool, which was FalcAU1.raw (at the time, this was the only texture I had). Now that I've changed that texture from the flat red it was originally, the truck looks a bit funny.
First I loaded the other two textures I had created into BINedit's texture pool. Earlier I had gone through the whole model, tagging groups of related faces and saving the groups as 'headlight', 'bumper', 'bonnet', windshield', 'side' etc.
By simply restoring each face group in turn, I could map them to their corresponding areas on the textures.
Tip: if you can find one, a 'magnifier' utility can be very useful when doing precise texture mapping. This is Microsoft ZoomIn, a utility which came with a copy of Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 Dev Studio that I have installed on my computer.
After much work I had the model mapped to relevant textures, as depicted below. Note that this is still only a half-model; I decided to map it like this first because this would save me having to map things like the headlight, mirror, and underside twice.
Similarly, I also mapped the sportsbar to the blended section on the second texture file, to make it appear metallic and reflective. The difference here was that this particular model was now practically finished - all I needed to do was mirror it to have the complete sportsbar.
Now that I could see just how the truck body would map to textures, I made a few minor adjustments here and there to the texture files - nothing drastic, just a few fixes where the mesh didn't quite fit properly or a bit of black was showing through.
I also painted the letters L and R onto the symmetric textures (such as the hood, windshield etc) to denote which side was left and which right. Because the textures appear mirrored in BINedit's mapping window, and because it's not easy to tell which way around the vertex mesh is, this would allow me to be sure that I wasn't mapping things reversed and wouldn't discover the fact until later on once I'd applied fancy designs or words to the textures.
Now I mirrored the model, inserted it onto itself and saved it to get the full truck (don't forget to merge them vertices!). Now was the time to map the other side, using the same technique as above. Because the original model had had saved face groups, these carried across when the model was inserted so that I now had face groups for both the original half and the newly mirrored half. For the symmetric sections such as the hood, I restored the face groups of both sides and remapped the whole lot rather than just remapping the side that needed it. This was trickier and required more work that just mapping the sides independently would have needed, but it saved me trying to make sure the two halves of it matched up.
A bit more fiddly work, and I at last had a fully-mapped model.
Now I could paint my textures proper. I took my time with these, coming back even after I first considered them "finished" and tweaking them further, while I continued to develop other parts of the truck. These were all entirely hand-drawn, apart from the headlights and taillights which came from images of the real vehicle (as mentioned above), and a few other details like the badging on the nose and tailgate. Hence these textures don't look photo-quality / antialiased like you might see on the stock MTM2 trucks, but the overall effect is crisp and clean, so they would be ideal for painting on later and could be antialiased then.
As I painted each section, I referred to the model in BINedit to check it looked right, and made any further adjustments which may have been necessary as I went. Moving the tonneau cover, so I could make it bigger and therefore have a larger area to paint on, was the biggest single change I made to the existing layout of the textures.
Note the copious use of painted highlights and shading to help emphasize the detail of the model - on the edges, ridges and lines of the panels and so forth, which make it look like they are catching the light. With clever use of paint like this, you can make it look like there are 3D details on an otherwise flat surface that has nothing modelled on it (and it's usually easier than trying to build it all in 3D). In my case, however, I built most of the lines and details into the model itself, and then used this as a template for the painted details of my textures. In any event, using flat-coloured textures masks the detail and the game's light does not really bring out the contours on its own, thus highlights and shading are a good idea for showing off the workmanship of your model :)
Here's how she looks now (High Quality 3D Textures view option turned on).
Innit bweaudiful? I know the AU's styling is controversial and not to everyone's tastes; but seeing it on my monitor after coming all this way, it looked absolutely stunning. I'd lovingly hand-crafted the model to be as faithful to the original as possible, and the crisp, neat paint of the textures on it simply enhanced the look further. For once, I was completely satisfied that my creation was perfect in every way.
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