Maluch JBeam rebuild

What would be a better idea then? New scratch Jbeam? That would be a lot of effort and there aren't many people who would do it. Fixing the current one? Wouldn't solve the problem of it being near impossible to add new parts, not to metion lack of universal wheels support.
For the Piccolina Jbeam, I could TRY to do it (but I have no idea if I can do it and it will definitely take a lot of time), of course it won't be a meshslap, it needs to crash like the original (windshield falling off except in high trim models with glued windshield, roof shredding off the chassis, the fenders need to be integrated in the body, etc). And needs a fully custom new suspension too which probably I can't do well on first try, someone will probably fix it after me. I will try this but you should have someone more experienced too in case if it was too hard for me, I have never done it before, I'm not promising anything, and keep in mind it can take many months.

 

I started some work on it (currently only on the front of the chassis) and it needs way more work than I imagined. I think I can, but it would be easier if the model was separated differently, for example having the headlights, signal lights and taillights as separate parts if possible, because that way I could make breakgroups easier. And also having a cut between the bottom of the side windshield bars and the body so it can crash like this (but not needed since this kind of crash seems to be rare):

 

So far I only made the Jbeam of the front fascia fit the shape, moved all the front nodes (will move the ones of the outer sides of the headlights too) and added a few more ones where necessary, removed some beams and added many new ones so the structure is stable, removed all triangles for now because I'll have to redo them anyway... Not much progress, this will take a while, after I fit the whole shape I'll still have to readjust all the weight and all the beam properties. And that's only for the chassis, there are all the other parts too.

 

Made fenders Jbeam, I'll have to improve the deformation on them later but it's already way better than with the original Jbeam

 

Not really I'm just doing the most necessary stuf for now and leaving the more important things for later (they will take most of the time). Also, I'm still not sure how much this will improve the deformation. The model is made in a (very bad) way that it's really hard to avoid stretching because the nodes have to be positioned in specific places to avoid affecting the wrong verticles, which means it can never perfectly fit the shape and there will always be some weird behavior. For example the back deforms like this now:

This doesn't happen in the real mod because the original nodes were placed using the Blender Jbeam exporter precisely to avoid this (even though the original author most likely had no idea how this works). The front deforms way better for me because I worked a lot on it to avoid this messy behavior, here is original vs mine after the same crash:

It's not perfect but it IS better. Still, it would be way easier to work on a properly made model.

 

That's good to know, explains why there weren't many pictures like that. If you have some knowledge about this, can you tell if the non-glued windshield could fall off the car on crash or no?

 

Mechanically, obviously they are different, because the Piccolina is mechanically based on the Beetle. But in terms of size (mostly, as the 126 is visibly smaller in every dimension), drivetrain layout, placement of most parts, most of the rigidity distribution on the body (thanks to similar pillars placement and size, this will have to be changed a bit though as it's not exact), and deformation, so most of the things that really matter here except for the mechanical bits like the suspension, both are technically based on the Fiat 500, which makes the Autobello a good choice for the beginning. Of course the suspension can be scratch made or ported from another car with enough effort (if I can't do it then probably someone else can), engine and transmission values can be just copied from the original mod (I believe they are good enough), node groups, breakgroups and stuff can be redefined to fit the actual parts layout which is what I'm doing, basically a lot of details from the original Jbeam are swappable to the new one, and keep in mind that I'm not making it just a meshslap with nodes moved around, I added and removed quite a few nodes and a lot of beams to make it deform at least decent-ish and I will change all the weight and beam properties to match the way the real car drives and crashes. I think I sound like I know what I'm doing now lol

 

Finished the floor, that was pretty easy compared to the front, I only had to move the existing nodes and it didn't cause any excessive structure stress or weird forces. The deformation of that part seems good so far too.

Edit: Started work on the rear quarter panels but I have to add more nodes for the fenders and bottom pieces, top parts not even touched yet