Truck: ShadowPrincess' Ride
Pod Name: SPrincess.pod
Version: MTM2
Released: 12 August 2006


This truck was made as a gift and dedication to ShadowPrincess, a fellow Aussie to me, and the lovely host and manager of the MTM2 racing tournaments. SP first popped the question to me about making a her truck in July 2005, to complete her trio of 'name' trucks including "Angel of Retribution" by Clawfford and Rep Fan, and "Niamh's Cemetary" by Alpine (plus "Princess' Punisher" that Rep Fan managed to sneak in before me). She gave me free reign to design it however I wanted (although this was to prove deceptive :p ) and it took me about 6 months to complete from the time I started at the beginning of 2006.

Well, I have never known a truck to have a process of creation as long and tortured as this one did... it evolved through no less than eight distinct versions to arrive at the final product, and actually started out as an entirely different model of truck. I originally began by repainting the converted EVO F-150 crewcab body by BigDOGGe, since I had made some really neat texures in the process of reskinning it for my last truck project. However SP really seemed to like my Driven2Extremes II truck body (made way back in 2000!), and eventually I decided I should listen to the lady :) and converted the project over to it. The final paint job also is very different to my initial scheme, although in it I have carried across and reinterpreted custom graphic designs from the very first version of the truck (in particular I retained a hand-drawn 'shadow princess' face graphic that was a staple from my original paint design, and reused a tiara lattice design I had made in a new way, blending and layering it over and through the background paint colours to give the whole truck an ornate wraparound paint).

Well, I won't go through all the details of its evolution here (which would take far too much space) - suffice to say that I'm really pleased with how it (eventually) turned out. As I said, I used my custom D2E-II body (actually repainting a truck I did named My Favourite Game), which historic readmes tell me was originally made by hacking up a fiberglass Bigfoot body by Lordcap. This modified body had many little modelling and texturing flaws and issues all over it that I had to fix and remap as I went along (the perils of revisiting your old work...) - the enhancements in BinEdit 2.2 (thanks Rich) were a great help here (note that due to its age the original model was created in BINedit 0.9!). It uses the same rooflamps by Inky, frame by Garret Lockhart and (modified) engine model by Karmageddon that I used on the MFG truck. New additions are shocks by BigDOGGe, and wheels by Rep Fan.

The main modelling work that went into this, aside from a series of tweaks and fixes, is the wing and the sound-and-vision installation in the bed. It was actually with one of the first (F-150) versions of the truck that I suggested to SP that I could customise it with a installation of speakers and subwoofers based on the one I had made for my Boyd Coddington XRod replica. After I switched to using the D2E-II body, she wasn't going to let me forget that offer, even though making it work with a fiberglass body was far more complicated. After much work and stretching of grey matter I found a way to make it all fit around the massive wheel wells of the fiberglass body, and look good and unique from the original layout in the XRod truck: to further differentiate, I retextured the speakers and subwoofers to real Blaupunkt models using images from their website. I even found this new speaker layout offered me the space to add a panel representing a TV screen, which I textured with an animated Australian flag graphic (screensaver of course!) to play up to SP's pride for her nationality. The final piece added was the wing, which is an entirely new part I built (and actually the second version of a unique wing made for this truck - look out for both wing models as parts downloads on my website).

The finishing touch was a custom WAV file made by cutting and re-assembling fragments of Army Armstrong commentary (both from the game, and supplemented with some extra audio recorded and provided by Wint)... and then it just took me an extra month to get around to writing this readme :p


You can visit SP's site at http://www.shadowprincess.com 
and for the MTM2 tourneys, http://www.shadowprincess.com/tourneys/mtm2.html

Visit my site at http://mtm2.com/~d2s/
Comments? You can e-mail me at d2smtm2@email.com


That's about it, thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy this truck even half as much as SP does :)

---Drive2Survive