If you remember from the outset of this story, my aim was to replicate the V8 Supercar event ute of John Thompson:
The most obvious visual change with the XR is the replacement the standard bumper, grille and headlights with a one-piece nose-cone incorporating quad round headlights; although, on the AU1 model, the lower half of the nose remains the same as the standard ute's bumper, with the exception of the indicators housed in the sides.
So to convert my standard AU Falcon ute into a likeness of the AU XR8, I need to do some work to the front end. First, I loaded my existing Falcon ute and deleted the body of the truck until I was left with just the front end, and saved this to a different name. I left part of the bonnet and front fenders attached, as I would be using these to help keep the changes I was about to make in proportion with the existing body of the ute.
Next I started moving vertices forward to merge the headlight with the bumper. I didn't touch the verts of the bumper, nor those along the top of the light - this part is supposed to simply fit onto the front of the truck after all - and I won't bother with the grille just yet.
Now for the round headlights. I've seen a few attempts at replicating the quad-lights of XR Falcons (mainly V8 Supercars) in games; some of them (Dick Johnson's V8 Challenge by Torus/HES, or the local release of Need For Speed High Stakes and the new V8 Challenge games, both by EA Sports) simply have the lights painted onto the body instead of modelling them, which I think is a fault. The lights being sunken into the nose cone means that they just don't look right to me painted on - it makes the car look like it's trying to be a Mercedes! There's nothing wrong with Mercedes, but they don't build Falcon utes. I much prefer the way it is portrayed in Gran Turismo 3 by Polyphony Digital, and Codemasters' upcoming V8 Supercar Race Driver, with the lights properly modelled into their recessed housings. Plus, I was never one for doing things the easy way anyway, so this is how I am going to do it on my own Falcon model.
To illustrate, here are some pics:
DJV8C uses textures rather than high-definition models to create its details. The cars are very rough looking, but the game was released back in 1999 so we'll forgive it that, and the texturing is superb and makes up for it to an extent - from a distance the cars look quite good.
The 2002-released EA Sports V8 Challenge game is much more detailed, and the overall graphics are quite impressive. Although it's worth bearing in mind that the entire game is basically little more than a mod of an existing game - which is actually the Swedish(!) Touring Car Championship 2 game by Digital Illusions CE (DICE) - and the game has some, shall we say 'quality assurance' problems, as far as the models are concerned, I'll give them kudos for decent quality, and the game also includes a bonus V8 Ute series featuring Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon utes!
The Race Driver game promises extraordinary physics, crash damage and detail - and yes, they did model the lights instead of just paint them on the bodywork! Although in my opinion, from what I've seen they messed up the proportions of the car (especially around the front), I'll grant it's still a nice bit of modelling...
However, Gran Turismo 3 is still the benchmark in my opinion, anywhere you look the cars are absolutely spot on.
So, now to my version of it all. I started by adding a single vertex for each light and positioning it where I thought the light's centre should be. I used these to estimate the radius of each light, using a head-on photo image of an AUII XR8 (part of which shown below) as a guide. You can click here to view the full size (800 x 600) image - it makes an ace desktop wallpaper!
Next I added a further 12 vertices for each light to form the light itself. I used a little trigonometry (see sketch page 6 and sketch page 7) to work out the coordinates to get perfect circles, although I ended up trying a couple of different numbers for the radius before I was happy with the size of the lights (and it's likely I'll be changing them again later on as well).
Now to build the recessed housings that the lights sit in. Rather than add a further 24 vertices, I took a slightly quicker and easier option: I deleted all the faces of the model except for the round lights themselves that I'd just added, translated them forward 100 units, and inserted them back into my XR model. Then I simply joined the vertices with faces to make the cylindrical cut-outs.
I now manipulated the positions of the vertices at the front of the cylinders to form an approximation of the proper shape. I also moved the vertices forward or back to make them lie reasonably flush against the existing structure of the nose cone.
For my next trick, I added in a plethora of faces to join all the nearby existing vertices of the nose cone with those of the light housings to merge the two together. Then I deleted all the faces of the nose cone that I no longer needed, and those that came with inserting the round lights onto the model, deleted the accumulated unused vertices, and viola!
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A lot of the new faces I added are triangles, which give the wireframe view a 'crystal cracked' appearance! Oh, well! Triangles are generally better for smoothing out curves anyway - because there's more of them, you can see any anomolies easier by virtue of the shading on the solid untextured model. For example, it is visible that there are a few wrinkles on the bumper under and around the lights that need smoothing.
I spent some time tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, until I was satisfied that the lights were as close as I could get them to the views shown in my images.
I took extra care with the outermost headlight to make sure the lip of the outside edge, where it protrudes slightly out of the nose cone, was visible (if only barely) when viewed from the correct angle.
Now I could set about building the new grille. I deleted all the faces of the original grille and, with a bit of re-jigging of vertices and adding a new face or two, produced the shape of the grille opening.
I then turned to modifying the bonnet of the car, first building the little bit that sticks out of the leading edge, on which the Ford badge sits.
Next I fixed up the bonnet where it had been distorted by my moving the vertices of the headlight to merge it with the bumper. Originally, the edge of the bonnet had been joined with the headlight, so I needed to seperate them to restore the leading edge of the bonnet to its original position and still keep the shape of the nose cone. This involved adding in a new, strategically placed vertex and reconstructing the faces to incorporate it.
Now I set about building the grille. I started by continuing the ridge that runs down the bonnet to the headlight of the original Falcon, part-way down along the edge of the grille opening. Off this I built the grille slat. Even though it only uses less than a dozen polygons, it has bit of a tricky shape so it took me a while to position the vertices to my satisfaction. To make it easier to work on, I repeated my earlier trick of rotating the model 180 degrees about the Y-axis to change the way the light source shines on the faces.
Now I added in the vertices to form the bottom edge of the grille opening, which protrudes a lot deeper than the ridge I have already built. Finally I added in the faces to form the back of the grille opening: the top half is made from one face, while the bottom half is made up of several faces joining the bottom edge of the grille opening and the tailing edge of the grille slat.
I didn't build the underside of the grille slat or the part of the bonnet that extends over the opening; due to some of the unusual properties of MTM2 shiny faces, doing so would either not look very good or be very costly in terms of the number of extra vertices required, and at any rate there is only a small angle from which these would be visible, so it would for the most part be wasted effort.
The half-XR8 nose-cone model has 160 vertices and 173 faces. Joining the two halves together, we have 304 vertices after merging and 346 faces, and it looks like this:
I didn't save it like this just yet; I wanted to map the headlights first, so I'd only need to map the two of them and not all four. I rotated the half-model 180 degrees about the Y axis to bring it back the right way around and saved it.
Now it was time to work on texturing it. I grabbed my three existing AU Falcon textures and copied them to new names; AU1XR81.raw, AU1XR82.raw and AU1XR83.raw. The second and third textures would be left as they are for now - the first file, AU1XR81.raw, I modified for mapping to the newly made model.
I reverted back to wireframes, as I had when first mapping my original Falcon model. I copied the wireframes for the bonnet and airdam straight from the original FalcAU1.raw texture. The bumper was also copied, although this needed modifying to incorporate the quad-headlight housings I had made. Wireframes for the grille were made in the same way I had made the wireframes when mapping my original Falcon ute before. The light textures came from the head-on XR8 image above (I modifed the red/green/blue content, as in the image they were reflecting the horizon which made them appear pink), and the blocks underneath them are for mapping the light housings. As before, I painted L and R on the textures to denote left- and right-hand sides and make sure I didn't map anything the wrong way around.
Now I went back to my half-nosecone model. First I deleted some of the faces attached to it that had once been part of the front fenders, so I wouldn't have to remap the sides of the truck again. After saving some useful face groups, I mapped the lights, light housings and back of the grille to their repective sections of the texture.
I saved the model, then mirrored it, inserted the original and merged the vertices to join the two halves together.
Now I could map the airdam, nosecone and grille. The nosecone was the most difficult and time-consuming, as I had decided to map it all as one piece in order to keep the continuity. Unfortunately, BINedit wanted to show the mesh as a top-down perspective, like it had when I had mapped the bumper of my original Falcon model, only this time there were a whole lot more vertices! It took quite some time to unravel the whole thing and drag each individual vertex to where I wanted it!
Now I had the model properly mapped... or so I thought.
Unfortunately, I later noticed that I must have mapped the nose cone slightly wonky - looking at it, the right side was good, but the left was pretty dodgy all around the headlights! It was simply too busy with all those vertices for me to map it equally on both sides as it was - obviously I must have fudged the vertex positions on one side more so than the other. I eventually decided to remap it (no easy decision, as mapping it the first time had taken me well over an hour!) as I wanted the texture to be pure and equal on both sides - none of this changing the texture to hide mapping mistakes, thereby rendering it asymmetrical, such that one side is not a real mirror of the other.
To help make sure I got all the vertices into their correct positions (and I needed all the help I could get), I modified the texture to have yellow crosses at each point where a vertex would be positioned. In this way, I should be able to properly position every single one, as the red crosses of the vertex mesh would cover up the yellow ones I had painted, and therefore make it easy to spot any anomalies.
This made it much easier to position the vertices while mapping - why didn't I think of this before? Unfortunately, even this measure didn't solve my problems; although I was positioning all the vertices exactly where I wanted them while mapping, it still came out looking wonky - worse than before, in fact! It was as if some of the vertices were creeping up or down the texture after I'd mapped it - only by one pixel, but it made a big difference to the appearance of the finished product and the fact that this was even happening was totally confounding me! Such are the vagaries of texture mapping...
After two more attempts it still hadn't improved, and I spent a curse-filled ten minutes trying to figure out what to do about it. I decided I was probably over-confusing things by trying to remap both sides at once, so I re-loaded the model without saving these changes to get back to how it was before I'd started remapping everything. Since the right side of the nosecone (looking at it) was mapped how I wanted it, I selected the face group for only the left side and remapped that only.
And to my surprise, it seemed to work properly, and matched the opposite side perfectly. I normally would have preferred to map both halves as one in order to ensure that everything aligns properly, but it looks like that may have been a pointless affair anyway. Why it gave me such trouble when I tried to map both halves as one I can't say... but now that's turned out alright, I don't particularly care either :p
Phew... so, at long last, I had the nose cone mapped as I wanted it. Now to attach it to the front of the truck.
I opened the body model and deleted the faces of the nose that will be replaced by the new nose I have been working on. I used MDMRE's Bin Texture Replacer to change the textures the model was mapped to from FalcAU1.raw, FalcAU2.raw and FalcAU3.raw to the new textures AU1XR81.raw, AU1XR82.raw, and AU1XR83.raw, respectively.
I then inserted my new nose cone, merged vertices and deleted the unused, and saved the model.
Now all that was left was to remap the bonnet, including the new leading edge, and it was done.
Now I could paint the truck and get rid of those damn ugly yellow dots. Most of the texturing for the front end was adapted from my existing files - the bonnet and bumper sections are almost exact copies from my FalcAU1.raw texture, with a few changes to fit the new shape of the model. The rest - mainly the grille and new headlight housings - I painted in the same manner as I had with my original Falcon ute; ie. by hand, with careful reference to the model itself to make sure it satisified my perfectionist nature.
The indicator lights set in the bumper were copied from a photograph (it took some time to find one that matched the tones of the headlights!). The only changes made to the second and third texture files were the addition of Tickford and XR8 badges to the flanks and tailgate. These were both made by copying the Tickford and XR logos, resizing them to be tiny and then touching up by hand. They are perhaps a little larger than they would be in real life, but I wanted them to be at least marginally recognisable, and at any rate it would have been impossible to go any smaller and still make the pixels meaningful.
You little beauty! The truck looks fantastic and I'll bet it drives well too. In this guise it has 808 vertices and 944 faces - the ubiquitous sportsbar brings it to 936 verts and 1066 faces, and with the frame it totals 980 vertices and 1102 faces. Phew - it's under 1000 verts, but only just!
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