Wolfi's American Workshop

[dreamcatcher]

Nice work Wolfi.

[Wolfi]

Thanks guys

A small update today. Rebuilt the headlights. New ones are a liiitle bit closer to real life ones and they now use correct lamp size 4x6". Also made the "stock" front bumper version with round cutouts for fog lamps. Also made optional foglamps. The current model is "borrowed" from MACK Anthem, so they are LED, but given that the truck is meant to be a classic, suped up for modern usage, they kinda make sense. (I'll make regular bulb ones at some point as well)
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@ChiliBeef Creating AO textures in Blender is, like everything else in Blender - tricky at first, but gets easier with time the more you do it. Nowadays I tend to avoid it though, as I personally find it hard to make the texture look clean without fiddling with it in Photoshop. Nowadays I tend to use Blender addon to bake AO directly into the model vertices (no AO texture needed) I think it looks overall cleaner and sharper and is easier to change/correct small mistakes by hand in real time.
My CL9000 uses a hybrid method, it does have classic AO texture, but it changes the overall looks only in a few areas, most of the model's AO though is vertex baked.

[ChiliBeef]

Oh, that front end look sharp! It almost looks like it's a rendered composition out of real life, it looks that good.

Damn, you're making me jealous with showing off this truck and you're keeping it all to yourself; I am, how you say in English, the sad. (Where's a cry smiley when you need it?) Not many classis CoEs available (that aren't crap) and I only have a Peterbilt 352, Kenworth K100, and Freightliner Agosy (after I've fixed some things with 'em) that I'll occasionally play with.

I'll have to look up how to do this "AO baking" in Blender. I'm learning something new everyday. You're right about fiddling with things in Photoshop, I swear I can spend half a day just in PS trying to get ONE texture to look right, what with trying to find the perfect texture on the interwebs to make it all work. Seeing all of your work and attention to detail does give me some good motivation to ensure I'm doing things correctly on my (first) mod. Your information also helps enlighten me on what I might be doing wrong and doing it correctly for better results, i.e. the AO baking into the vertex.*

*I'll be perfectly honest: every time I see the word "vertex", I just picture that tiny, single-colored dot you can grab and move around in Blender to change a mesh shape. And, then my brain gets all confused on how a little dot can be "weighted (normal)", "painted", or even have a whole texture baked into it. Yes, I am that inexperienced with Blender.

[xXCARL1992Xx]

for vertex paint to work properly you need a certain amount of polygons though or else it wont look good at all, the old trucks for both games are a perfect example, they do have vertex baking but only simple one, only since the New Scania SCS made the trucks so high poly that vertex painting them entirely worked

[Wolfi]

Thanks

And today: some tuning. I might have used a bit too many Ford logos
Other than that, rebuilt front bumpers to look more realistic and added chrome variant for every aluminum part. (I did keep some alu parts on my truck though to keep it somewhat realistic..)
Also, windshield wipers (which were originally taken from a donor mod) were rebuilt and re-animated from scratch. Thanks to Carl's help both arms now work in parallel, rather than a single entity, which makes driving in the rain that much more fun
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And a sneaky look at the current interior/dashboard.
I originallyreplaced the non-functional texture odometer, with the one from International 9900i. But it was standing out like a sore thumb, so decided to change it to look a bit more as it should (again, with Carl's help). Yes it's still digital instead of mechanical, but I still think it fits in quite well. (and yes - this truck has 0 miles on it, since it's a fresh new one for some additional testing)
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[JoeAlex23]

That Ford is looking really good! I was never a fan of that truck but seeing it in the hands of a good modder it has grown on me quite a lot! Sad that it will be locked in your basement forever haha, but it's nice to see and appreciate what you're doing with it!

[Ruward]

Nice ford!

[ChiliBeef]

@Wolfi BREAKING NEWS: This just in! I secretly hate you because that's such a beautiful truck and I so want to add it to my collection.

You are such a rooster tantalizer.

[Wolfi]

Thanks guys
I'll just point out that the CL9000 isn't inaccessible - there are at least 2 decently looking mods floating around, they both look like conversion from Snowrunner, so they should be fairly decent

Meanwhile, my truck went back to white
I finally managed to get my paws on original hi-res brochures. The brochure mentions 5 cab lengths, but the bodybuilder part from the very same brochure only mentions 3 -110", 88" and 64"
I decided to verify my cab dimensions and while width and height I nailed perfectly (using only photo-scaling LOL) the length for some reason didn't match (also the shape of rear wall was off ) I assume my reference pictures were showing one of the 2 mythical cabs not listed in the official bodybuilder. In any case, I decided to biggify my cab to match the top factory spec 110" which meant it had to grow bigger by a whole 20cm (almost 8"). That, combined with change of rear wall shape forced me to remap the whole cab and as a result my fancy "Soft Fan" paintjob doesn't fit anymore
So until I get myself into photoshop again, the truck will remain white, but at least the cab size is now 100% correct.
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[ChiliBeef]

@Wolfi You're definitely living up to your signature (Which, btw, does not require a comma in this context. *cough* And, one is used with a direct address, like "Thanks, guys." ) .