Greetings, I noticed a neat thing with the Barstow, that the whole front subframe eventually cracks out from its mounts and flies away. So does body of Pigeon and once ... just once ... I managed to tear of the body shell of the frame with Burnside. My question is, since we all have seen some cruel&crude car crashes in real life, the metal does not always holds things together. Would it possible to create something like "tear points" on unibody vehicles? Or it would need complete re-model/re-script of the whole thing? Example being, the LeGran series are fun to crash, but sometimes when the rear slips and catches on something, the whole car just ends up as one long metal sausage dog, where "in reality" you would probably just tear out either piece of body or (in cases that happened to me in game) the whole rear axle. Again, this is just my mind speaking out loud, so if this would mean complete remodeling of everything, please do no flip into infinte rage of level 9000 and beyond
Yes, I was thinking from beginning that making a metal part shear/tera is currently not doable. But let me rephrase my question: IF a car body shell is/would be made out of separate parts, sort of cheating here, would it be possible to, for example, make the front end (with front axle mounts), floor pans, rear end (with rear axle mounts) and roof as separate models, that hold together the way as Barstow's front subframe?
While the current answers are correct, I think they need a little rephrasing. Tearing in the current simulation is 100% possible and can realistically simulated. When the tearing of the Node/Beam structure happens and is applied to the mesh, this becomes very unappealing. Before the meshes would just disappear, sometimes you would get some infinitely long spikes that would appear to have come from nowhere... that was tearing. Part of the mesh would follow the first set of nodes and part of the mesh would follow the second set of nodes... the bit in the middle would turn into some strange spaghetti... thing... that would just look horrible. There were of course 4 solutions to this problem. Solution 1. Make the structure so strong that when a very excessive force is applied, the beams don't break... they just keep stretching. Your hot dog car is a good example of this. Solution 2. Make part of the mesh that runs along the beams that broke disappear. This is the more recent solution which can be seen occasionally if you really do a number to part of your car. The one I see it the most is that big plane made by Mitchell. Solution 3. Basically exactly as you mentioned, make a whole bunch of pre cut meshes and be very careful about how you define their deformation groups. If you have any overlap of nodes then you will just be stuck with the same problem as you were trying to solve in the first place. This method however would cause some strange looking movements from the panels while you were driving as the natural flexing would make the panels look like they were made of a bunch of pieces of broken ice bobbing around on wavy water. Solution 4. Have an algorithm dynamically "cut" the mesh where the beams break. This to me sounds like a good solution, but would be very difficult to implement as you would be starting with 1 mesh, and ending with 2 or more "new meshes" depending on where the vehicle tore at. Easy in theory, much more difficult in practice. Special Solution 5. The holy grail of the tearing problem. Dynamically generate new nodes at the midpoint of all beams that break and then reconnect them to their respective sides with new dynamically generated beams. Then recalibrate the flexbody deformation groups and deform as normal while still making use of solution 2. This would be the most realistic, but also practically completely impossible with the way that JBeams are currently handled by Beam's engine.
Perfect explanation. A combination of all of the above would be the way to do it imo. Ripping cars apart is possible, but has the effects atv_123 mentioned... @FLyInG 2 YoUr SoUL and I has been experimenting with this some. (exploding is unintentional, but it lets you see how the game handles a crude implementation of ripping.) @crashmaster made the original Splitable Covet - proving it 'can' be done. Also showing how incredibly smart and talented he is edited 5x... can't type today I guess
This is interesting. I was (obviously wrong) thinking that the cheat method of making car on purpose from detach-able parts would be "the thing" in this ...
http://www.beamng.com/threads/cl-cloth.9199/ http://www.beamng.com/threads/high-resolution-cloth-tester.12646/ The second one, the high resolution cloth tester might give you an idea on how hard it'd be to simulate the tearing of metal, at from my opinion. I like the cloth tester, it's fun to play with until it crashes the game. Haven't used it in awhile, I think it still works, doesn't have a drivetrain so it should.
http://www.beamng.com/threads/splitable-covet.21931/ Have you guys seen this? It still drives. It's just a little off on gearing, but it does split down the middle. Not sure if this idea can be used to simulate missing body panels. I mean, when you hit it, the body panels do disappear, so I'm think it can be done.
Triangles disappear because of meshBreaking. It's the current technique used by the game to disguise spiking and mesh stretching of broken parts. When enabled, the mesh triangles right beneath broken beams disappear.