| The faces of a .BIN model are visible when viewed from one side and invisible from the other. They seem to be visible from the side where the vertices of their points are defined clockwise. |
| Experienced truck makers, and those who have a basic knowledge of BINedit, will notice that I didn't use two commands in the Vertex menu that could reduce the vertex count on the model: Merge Close Vertices followed by Delete All Unused after inserting my inverted body onto the normal body. This is a complicated issue but there is a reason behind my not doing this. Firstly, I should mention the "1000 vertex limit", which is the bane of truckmakers who like to go over the top in detail on their trucks. You should by now be familiar with MTM2's "shiny faces" feature: the trucks you drive around in MTM2 have nice shiny, reflective bodies, as opposed to the vehicles in MTM1 whose faces were not shiny but only changed brightness according to the orientation towards light. But MTM2 is flawed in this feature: most 3D-accelerator hardware cannot cope with making shiny faces on models with over 1000 vertices (but machines without a 3D card will function fine). The number does vary for a select few cards, but most will give you an error about being "unable to environment map model" with a truck whose vertice count is higher than 1000. There are only two ways around this: 1) Turn off "Truck reflectivity" in the MTM2 graphics options. This reverts back to the old MTM1 style non-shiny faces (which some people actually prefer), but you will be able to drive this truck without error now. 2) As a truck maker, either limit your truck's vertex count to less than 1000 (remember that 0 counts as the first vertex in BINedit, so the last vertex must be 999 or less), or set all the faces of your truck to normal (MTM1) type in Groups -> Set Face Group Type... menu command or when BINedit asks you when you save the model. Now back to the question: what I could have done after putting the normal and inverted bodies together to make the fiberglassed body, was go Vertex -> Merge Close Vertices and then Vertex -> Delete All Unused. Since both the normal and inverted versions of the body retain vertices in exactly the same places, it seems pointless to have these points duplicated for the normal and inverted bodies that form the whole truck, and given the necessity of keeping below 1000 verts, you may well wonder why I did not get rid of the unnecessary verts. Well, you see, fiberglassing a truck body in this manner poses a new problem. For some reason, when two faces are "back-to-back" (sharing the same vertices and facing opposite directions) they lose their shininess and become dull and shadowy. This will be better explained using an example: 
Here, my Flying Falcon '99 replica poses in each of the three possible fiberglassed forms, in Tracked2 which uses MTM2's graphical engine. In the first, the truck has been put together as I just put Devil's Dodge together, ie. the verts have not been merged and the faces are set to MTM2 (shiny) texture. In the second image, the Merge Close Vertices command has been carried out. You can see how, especially on the sides, the truck looks dark, as if there were a big shadow over it. In the third image the face type has been set to MTM1 (normal) texture: the truck looks nice and bright again but blocky (especially on the windshield). Now personally I think that the first truck image looks the best: the truck is nice and polished, and you can't see the individual faces that make it up. The second is just plain awful and the third, while better, is a poor substitute. The problem with this particular truck is that, with vertices unmerged, it exceeds the 1000 vertex limit. As I don't have a 3D-accelerator card installed, this is not a problem for me, but when I release this truck to the public it will be for anyone who does (which, granted, is nearly everybody). The way I got around this with this particular truck was to release two different versions: one with the unmerged-but-exceeds-1000-vertices body for poor saps like me who don't have a decent computer, and one with the merged, MTM1 texture body for all those lucky gits with good machines. That is the main reason why I prefer not to merge the verts when I fiberglass a truck, because I laboured long and hard on that paintjob and I'm not going to see it like it's been through a coal processing plant! I should point out however that a few 3D cards WILL in fact correct the "merged verts = shadowy faces" problem, however these are the minority and should be treated as an exception. |