The problem with having a project drag on like this is that you expose yourself to the danger of running out of momentum to finish it. In my case, life as a university student meant that for many months of the year I had to put this aside to concentrate on other things. The hardest part for me is getting started, and as I continually disrupted work on this model, so each time I found it harder to resume... more than once I considered I may not actually finish.
The other danger is that, if you spend all your time thinking about it but not doing, then you start to find niggling little things that are wrong with the model. While taking a break to clear one's mind is the best way to look at something with new eyes and spot something that needs fixing, for a project like this, where I am striving to produce as accurate a replica of a real vehicle as possible, it can mean that you end up going around in circles finding small imperfections and trying to fix them all, instead of actually completing the thing and pushing it out.
Enough of the psychobabble - I'll give it to you straight. Although I wasn't always working on this model, I occasionally played with test versions in the game, and the project was still in the back of my mind. As I glimpsed examples of the real vehicle in day-to-day life, I started the think that I hadn't, in fact, completely nailed the proportions of the rear end of the ute - on the real thing, it seemed to be slightly larger against the cab section than I'd portrayed it. Also, one of my friends who had seen a close-up shot of my model, exclaimed that I needed to put more polys into the wheel wells to clean up the straight lines and angles into something more curved.
I spent a long time weighing up the pros and cons of following either, or both, proposed modifications through to completion. On the one hand it would mean much more work when I had precious enough resolve to even keep moving forward... but on the other, it would mean a better model, and peace of mind that I'd done the best job possible. In the end, the thing that tipped it for me was the potential that this would not just be limited to MTM2 - I could easily import the model into other games (how cool would it be in the free car simulation project Racer?) or use it for other applications, in which it would be better to have done it right at the beginning.
To aid in this, I wanted a side-on pic of the car to compare to my model - something that up until now I'd been able to procure, in fact! So I purposely went out and photographed a Falcon XLS ute in a parking lot from the side to fulfill this void:
Boy, would things have been easier if I'd had a pic like this when I was starting out! Better late than never, I suppose. I fired up BINedit and searched through my backup and development models, to find one that would be suitable for modifying. Eventually I settled on a half-model, and reversed it so that the orientation was the same as in the photograph. This meant that the truck model was now facing backward, but it made it easier to match with the photo. I saved this to a different name to avoid wiping out anything that I might want yet further down the track.
First order of business was to tweak the rear end of the model, to make it longer and larger. I took my time with this, in order to try to let it come naturally, rather than brutally attempt to match the model to the picture and propogate further quibbles that would come back to haunt me later (I already had more than enough of those!).
When I felt it was close-ish to the truth, I grabbed paper and pencil and set about remodelling the wheel wells. This involved stripping out a few existing faces, adding some vertices and then adding new faces to improve the curvature of the wheel arches.
To assist with moving the vertices to the correct locations, I mapped the new faces to the textures so that they would be the correct colour, and the wheel arches would contrast nicely with the dark wells. This meant that the newly added faces were no longer obvious, so for the purposes of this documentation I've tagged them so that they are highlighted green for the screen shot below.
The nice thing about this modification (in terms of vertex count) was the extremely low overhead needed to effect the improvements: for the front wheel arches, I only added two vertices to the rim to get the extra polygons I wanted, while for the rear I was able to salvage two vertices that had been made redundant from the modifications carried out on the bed, and would otherwise have been deleted - yet for such a minimalist change, it greatly enhanced the look of the wheel arches (particularly the front ones, on which the kinks where the faces joined were painfully obvious). Beautiful.
So, after a few more tweaks and twiddles, I was finally satisfied with the model; now I just had to update my textures and remap it. To get it just right, this would have meant redrawing the wireframe structure as I'd done when I first mapped it - but conveniently, I still had copies of those original textures as a result of including them in this documentation! So, after backing up the old texture files, I simply incorporated these into FalcAU2.raw and FalcAU3.raw so I could map the model.
The image I used for FalcAU2.raw (the sides of the truck) is the exact same as the original from a couple of pages back - the fact that I'd changed the model since then only introduced a few minor discrepancies with the fit of the vertex mesh over the texture. For FalcAU3.raw, I shuffled the texture around so that the underbody would be located up the top-left side, and the tailgate at the bottom right. Because the sides of the bed had changed so drastically, and because I wanted to redo those textures without so much distortion, the old wireframes I had for those sections was inadequate, so I left them blank to fill in later. Heres's how I went about it...
First, I cycled through the faces of the model and tagged and stored useful groups - the sides, underbody, etcetera. After mapping the underbody, I mapped the side of the cab to FalcAU2.raw.
Once I had the vertex mesh correctly scaled and placed, I took a screenshot so I could use the rear of the cab (indicated by arrows) for determining how high to scale the bed sections that join it. Keeping both sections the same scale would make painting designs on the side of the truck much easier in the future - it's hard to line things up when your textures are all different sizes!
From this, I determined that I should make my bed textures 75 pixels high. This only left the question of how long it should be, so to get an approximation I took a screenshot in BINedit, and cropped off the bed from the side-on orthogonal view to paste onto the top right of my FalcAU3.raw texture.
I had to enlarge it to match the height, and this resizing caused some distortion and pixelation to the mesh, but I was only using this as an approximation so I didn't worry too much about this. I also copied the original (smaller) mesh texture beneath it, so I had it on hand for reference. I straightened out the top of the bed rather than have it stepped like I'd done with the original, and copied the redrawn parts for the rear and tailight onto the new texture.
Then I mapped it. Pleasingly, the texture turned out to be quite a good fit for the mesh.
Satisfied with the overall fit, I updated my texture for the other side of the truck and also painted the underbody.
Now for the tricky stuff. To avoid remapping absolutely everything, I intended to import the parts of the model I'd changed into my other models, retaining as much as I could from them. Admittedly, this wasn't much - I'd changed the fenders and sides of the cab, the rear window, the underbody and the entire back section, so all that would be left untouched was the nose and top of the hood and cab!
To achieve this, I cycled through the faces and deleted the bumper, headlights, grille, bonnet, windshield and roof. Next I mirrored my two halves to join them together. The intention is to take the deleted parts from my (previously-considered completed) Falcon AU and XR8 models and slot them into the gaps, thus saving me the tricky business of remapping those bits.
First though, I had to finish mapping and painting it. Now that I had the two halves joined together, I could map the left-hand side, rear window, tailgate and tarpaulin on the back.
Now for the paint. For FalcAU1.raw and FalcAU2.raw, this was simply a matter of restoring my originals since the layout hadn't changed - all I needed to do to these was touch up the wheel arches on FalcAU2.raw to fit the new shape of those on the model. FalcAU3.raw needed a lot of work, since I'd rearranged everything (and changed the shapes of most of these textures too), however I was still able to recycle most of my previous textures and adjust them to fit the new shapes.
Next I opened one of my previous Falcon models, and deleted all the body panels that would be replaced with my new version...
...and used the Insert command to slot it into my modified body model. After merging close vertices and deleting the unused, and setting the face type to MTM2 shiny texture, it was done!
Then I repeated this process for my AU1 XR8, and updated it's textures to match the new layout.
The last order of business was the sportsbar, which no longer fit properly following my wrangling of the bed section.
This was relatively easy to fix, as I just tagged groups of vertices and used the Translate command to adjust the locations of the joints and base of each bar. Once it fit the body again, I deleted the body so that I was left with only the sportsbar, and saved it for use on other models.
And thus ends the intermission. Although it was a lot of work for relatively slight modifications and the visual differences are only subtle, overall I'm quite pleased with how it went. To my eyes it looks much better than before, plus the textures for the bed sides are much nicer now and I no longer have nagging thoughts about the proportions of the body or the polygons in the wheel wells.