The AUII Falcon arrived later in 2000, and the changes were mainly cosmetic for the sedan and wagon variants with items such as a new grille and larger wheels to fill the gaping wheel arches. By contrast, for the hugely successful AUII Falcon ute Ford kept the changes to a minimum, so that AUI and AUII utilities are almost indentical to one another. The story is not the same for the Tickford XR's, which, like their sedan counterparts, adopted a redesigned, more purposeful-looking airdam for the front nose cone, twin-slatted grille and other items such as optional deeper side skirts.
Again, the main work I needed to do was on the front end. So, I first removed the nose cone from the body and this time took the fenders with it, as I also would be reworking the underside and the shape of the wheel arches at the front. I removed the existing grille and reshaped the cutout to something approximating the shape of the AUII XR grille, which has straighter lines.
I later decided that it would make it easier to work on the nose cone exclusively if I were to remove the fenders entirely - I'll be coming back to modify these later. This made it much easier to concentrate on the parts I was working on and get the grille into a better shape.
Next I stripped off the existing bumper and began to replace it with faces approximating the openings of the new airdam, starting from the outside with the small brake duct openings and working in.
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After building the face of the bumper, I then modelled the internal sections of the airdams. For the central opening this was fairly straightforward; the brake duct on the side was a bit trickier due to the curvature of the opening.
Next came the bottom section of the bumper. This is almost flat and fairly straightforward, the only detail I took was to make the leading edge curve as smoothly as possible.
I now spent some time editing the model to make it match the real thing as precisely as I could. In particular I was trying to make the proportions of the airdams correct as compared to the bumper as a whole, and I also tried to smooth out any joins between faces. This involved piecing the two halves together using the mirror trick to check the height and width, and generally just moving vertices around in tiny increments until I was satisfied with their positions. For this I used a number of images of the front of the vehicle for comparison, in particular returning to the head-on image I used previously (click here for the full size (800 x 600) image).
After a bit of tinkering with the depth of the airdam, the last detail for the nose cone was the addition of the extensions on the bottom of the bumper that match the deeper side skirts. These are an optional package on the real car, but for my model I wasn't going to bother with making a version without them - too much hassle, and besides, it looks so much cooler with them. These were a fairly straightforward addition to the model, being nothing more than a few faces fitted to the bottom of the bumper - the real work would be for the underside when I come to attach it back to the rest of the vehicle.
There was one final piece missing from my creation - the two-slatted grille. Since they mirror the curvature of the leading edge of the bonnet and are positioned according to the lines formed by the slope of the front, I introduced part of the bonnet back into my model for this part. I opened my front-end model which I'd saved earlier, deleted everything except for the leading edge of the bonnet, and then inserted this into my nosecone model, so I could make sure I shaped and positioned the slats correctly.
Technically the grille is a fairly simple bit of modelling, but getting it just right was very difficult, mainly due to the fact that those faces I added were rendered the same colour (ie white) as the surrounding grille opening - they just blended in without trace. To help my eyes, I tagged those faces to make them appear tinted green so that they would stand out against the rest of the model.
My big secret - there is no underside to these grille slats (same as the bonnet) so if you look at the model from the right angle, you can see right through 'em! I didn't bother with undersides for them because it is only through an extremely small and awkward angle at which this is noticeable, and it's barely perceptible when zoomed right in close to the model, so at game viewing distance it's not going to be a factor at all.
Now that that was done, I deleted the faces of the bonnet I had inserted, deleted the unemployed vertices (which included both those of the bonnet and one or two I had floating around from building other parts of the bumper) and saved it.
To finish off the last of what I could do on the bumper alone, I added some faces to form the underside and back faces of the skirt extensions. Now I had to get the thing to fit onto my existing truck body.
I opened up the body model for my AU1 XR8 and deleted the nose off it, including parts of the wheel wells and the leading edge of the underbelly. In effect, I deleted all the faces that would be replaced by the new structure, as well as those that were at the boundary between old and new - these were to be replaced to allow to the new nose to mesh with the existing body.
My initial plan was to insert the new nose onto this model, and create new faces to join the two together, and then delete the body leaving me with just the nose and the new faces that would allow it to literally plug-in to the body. However, after some consideration I decided to go about it in a slightly different way - noting down the coordinates of the vertices to which the new faces would need to attach with the intention of creating the new faces on the nose model itself, thus avoiding having to insert the nose onto the body and subsequently deleting all the faces of the body.
I went back to my nosecone model and added vertices at the coordinates I'd noted from inspecting the body model, then added faces to form the bottom of the bumper/spoiler and forward wall of the wheelwell.
I did have to change the coordinates of some of these vertices slightly - all the ones forming the underside of the bumper had their Y-coordinates set to -55 to lie flush with the bottom edge of the bumper, although their two other coordinate values were left unchanged so that the only changes I had to make to the corresponding vertices of the body model were to change their Y-coordinates to -55 also.
Now it's texture time! I would be modifying my AU1 XR8 textures for this AU2 XR8 truck, although there's a little bit I can do now before I start changing things. I copied my AU1XR81, AU1XR82 and AU1XR83 texture files to new filenames AU2XR81, AU2XR82 and AU2XR83 respectively. Then I loaded AU2XR83.RAW into BINedit - remember the third texture contains mapping for the rear of the truck as well as the underside - and mapped the faces I'd added for the underside of the bumper and forward wall of the wheelwell to appropriate positions on the texture.
Now, about the only thing I had left to do was to map the front to some new textures... of course, first I had to create the new texture file. This is based on my AU1XR81.raw texture, with new wireframe sections to accomodate the new bits of the model. In fact there's so much new stuff going on it's quite crowded there... still, I managed to fit it all on there one way or another, though it did take a bit of shuffling to do! Note that I left half of the original XR8 bumper texture there, as this contains a large number of unique colours in the image - if I removed it, I would have to resave the palette file because the colour contents of the texture would change, and since I wanted those colours for the finished product anyway I'd then have to reintroduce those same colours again afterwards, so leaving it there saves a few steps in between.
Next came a great deal of painstaking mapping work to apply these textures to the model. As I worked through mapping the various parts of the model, I stored face groups for each, which were not only useful now but would come in handy later. Most of this I considered only 'preliminary' mapping - many areas would likely be remapped once I'd done the other half, in order for it to properly match up - but still I took great care to ensure it was accurate.
I also made slight changes to the texture file itself as I mapped - modifying some sections or creating entirely new ones to cater for certain areas of the model. Now I completed the layout changes, mirroring the bumper and grille sections to form the other side of the vehicle. Notice the sections of the old bumper pasted temporarily onto the windshield - this preserves the colour palette of the file, as well as certain painted details (primarily the headlight surrounds) that I intended to utilise in the finished product.
So, now I mirrored my current bumper model to get the other side, inserted it onto the existing, merged vertices and deleted the unused, and saved. (As an anecdote, that brought the vertex-count on this nosecone model to exactly 400 vertices.)
Then I remapped the 'new' side (and some bits of the old) to its proper location on the textures, taking pains to get everything as even and precise as possible. This took a great deal of time and I often had to map parts multiple times to it perfect, but I wanted to get it right now rather than leave niggling little faults that would come back to haunt me later. As I'd already stored face groups for all the sections of the model before mirroring, those face groups were carried over with the mirrored model, so that I now had face groups for both halves of the model, which greatly simplified the mapping process.
Finally! I have the truck mapped and the texture layout sorted, so I could paint the textures proper, using my head-on XR8 image and a few other pictures for reference. I re-used the exiting headlight surround detail with some minor modification but other than that, this is all new texture work.
Here's how it looks on the model (high-quality 3D textures mode turned on).
Almost done! Now the only thing I have remaining is some slight modifications to the body to create the deeper side and rear skirts. I reopened the body model I'd previously modified above...
...and tweaked the lower edges of the body to produce the deeper edging. For the cab sections, this was simple enough - simply dragging the vertices of the existing edge down. For the rear corners, I deleted the existing faces of the bottom of the fender area and replaced them with a new face structure to make the chunky, angular skirts.
Once I had my model correctly set up, I modified my other two XR8 textures to have sections to map to the side skirts. I could have left the cab sections as they were, but lowering the edge of the cab has stretched the faces which, with their current mapping, results in texture distortion, and it seemed like too much of a hack to leave it like that. So, I split off the lower edges of the cab and bed textures, enlarging them slightly to better fit the deeper skirts on the truck body.
Then, I simply mapped the new and modified faces of the skirts. I didn't touch the existing mapping of the cab and bed sides; only the new side skirts.
Almost done! I selected all the faces of the body and set them to MTM2 Shiny Texture, then saved the model and opened my XR8 nosecone model. I repeated setting the faces on this to MTM2 types, except for the vertical fins of the grille which I made sure were set to MTM Normal Texture to avoid the darkening that happens with back-to-back faces that are set to Shiny types. Finally, I inserted the nose into the body, merged and deleted vertices, and it was finished! Time to pod it up and go for a drive!
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