It's hand drawn. I can't tell from the image quality though if the colors were airbrushed by hand or done in Photoshop (in this day and age I'm guessing Photoshop).

Despite being based on the latest restoration they did at least draw the TV antenna pointing in the right direction.

Oh, well then, that's some nice drawing and coloring. To me it looked like an image of a 3D model with some fancy shading and rendering.

A big company like hotwheels would not waste time on a 3D model, when you can do a drawing which takes half the time, espically for box art that some kid is going chuck in the bin.

I saw some other boxes for Hot Wheels cars and they looked like drawings. However, the picture on the ECTO-1 Hot Wheels box still looks like a 3D model to me. I guess after so many years of working on a 3D model ECTO-1, just about all images of an ECTO-1 start to look like 3D models.

I looked again at the ECTO-1 image on the Hot Wheels box and noticed that you can see the silhouettes of the windows on the other side of the car, so the windows aren't made to look completely solid black as I initially thought.

Anyways, I got the lightbar fixed.



A close up without the blue tinted covers. I got the rotating lights spot on thanks to some photos in that massive collection of ECTO-1 reference pictures which Cosmic-Riptide sent me.



It looks lame in the program but it'll look much better once in the game.

Before I get the lightbar attached to the mounting piece, I need to adjust the roof. The light bar is practically touching the roof and the mounting part that goes up to the lightbar is stretched too far. Luckily, there is space to flatten the overextended curvature of the roof without needing to adjust the ceiling on the inside of the car. Once adjusted, I shouldn't have anymore proportion troubles while putting on the lightbars and roof rack.

looks good! cant remember the silver stripes on top of the lightbar!

Today, for an experiment, I put the ECTO-1 beta version which I had created for Vice City into GTA III. It didn't work, however. But then I exported the model for GTA III, and it worked afterwards.

Both GTA III and Vice City use the same file formats, so I was curious to know if the version for Vice City would be compatible with GTA III.

The ECTO-1 in GTA III:


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As for the model's roof rack, I don't have any update pictures, yet. I was making some progress awhile back, but these days are quite busy, and so the project is on hold. However, some good news is that the rear lightbar mounts are basically finished. Those lightbar mounts will need only some minor adjustments to become the front lightbar mounts.

Just for some amusement, I put the roof rack from my first ECTO-1 mod onto the car:




I mostly wanted to see how it would look with a roof rack. As you can tell by the pictures, I just quickly put this together.

Even the alpha roof-rack makes it look good. Without all that stuff on top, the ECTO-1 seems kinda…y'know, naked.

hi! wasnt here for a looooooooong time! good to see that u are still working on this project!

Well, I want to still work on this, but I work full time now. I have trouble even finding time to eat and sleep, and so working on this is simply impossible at this point.

I don't know how I'll finish this project.