Truck: Boyd Coddington "XRod" Ford XR8 ute
Pod Name: XRod.pod
Version: MTM2
Completed: 26 January 2004


This truck is based on the custom 1999 AU XR8 utility by Boyd's. Yep, you read that right - Boyd Coddington has officially 'hot rodded' an Aussie icon! For those of you not in the know, Boyd Coddington is one of America's most successful hot rod and custom car builders in the last two decades, who now also designs and markets a whole range of billet wheels. See Boyd's site at http://www.billetwheel.com/.

So how did a Falcon utility come to find it's way into Boyd's workshop in the USA? Well, rumour has it that Ford Australia had sent an XR8 ute to America some time back as a demonstration vehicle to Ford USA. After a stint on display in Ford's head office, it was packed away into storage. Now, Boyd's had been heavily involved in modifying F-series trucks for Ford of America, and when Ford Australia heard of Boyd's plans for expansion into the Australian market... well, I think you can figure out the next bit! While the modifications that make up this 'XRod' were actually quite mild - especially by the standards seen in others of Boyd's customs - there is no doubting the end product looks magnificent, with many standout little touches like shaved door handles, chrome grille inserts and orange/silver highlighted interior.  

This MTM2 version a pretty close replica of the real showcar. I originally intended to do only a simple repaint of my AU XR8 utility, copying the showcar's striking orange/purple/white paintscheme, and maybe modify the model a little in the back to represent the banks of speakers and subwoofers. But the more I looked at pictures of the showcar, the further into detail I was drawn, so that the finished product is the result of some very complicated binediting and painting and no little amount of effort!

I started out by repainting the textures of my AU XR8 ute model. The paintwork on the body was fairly simple to do (hand-rendered antialising notwithstanding) as I'd laid out my textures precisely for easy repainting when I first built the model. Things got more complicated when I started on the inside of the bed, but despite having only about two photos worth of reference I actually got quite carried away modelling and detailing this section. It has two banks of four subwoofers on either side of the bed, two sets of four speakers at the front, and a metal-textured floor with a large recessed Boyd Coddington logo, all scratch-built. The speakers and subwoofers were all made from the round speaker shape from BigDOGGe's subwoofer model, which I retextured and duplicated to create my new sound banks. The texturing in the bed is mostly hand-drawn, apart from the texture of the subwoofers, which was a straight copy/paste of an image found on Pioneer's website. All up, the inner bed turned out beautifully detailed and accurate, but with a whopping thirst for vertices - almost 700 by itself! - which put the whole truck just above 1650 vertices, making this the most detailed project I've yet built.

From here it seemed I only had a few finishing touches to add - XRod license plates, and custom tyres with a hand-drawn rendition of the 'Blaster' wheel from Boyd's line, as fitted to the real car. However, the madness returned again as I decided to add the snazzy silver slats inserted into the grille and airdam of the bumper; these pushed the vertex count for the body up to just shy of 1900 vertices, insane! You can hardly see it clearly in-game either, but it looks good enough when you DO get to see it clearly that I wasn't going to remove 'em.

Enjoy the truck! Big thanks to Doug Bevan, webmaster of www.trueblueford.com, whose pictures and article on the XRod were a big help to me in making this.


Suggestions and comments welcome please.
You can e-mail me at d2smtm2@email.com
Check out my websites at http://mtm2.com/~d2s/

That's about all... have fun with this!

---Drive2Survive
"Live for the Ride. Drive to Survive."