So how actually you can do a fast body jbeam, I know there is a Blender node export add-on in the forum, but it still need time to redo the format. And I think there are lots of people just like me that don't have a lot of time on these(lazy actually)
I would recommend masa's node editor thing, not only is it faster, but you can see what your doing, i prefer that one mostly because i dont know what im doing by hand, but for placing nodes, beams and triangles i use the node editor. i still use notepad but its not for actual node beams things.
Ok, first of all, it depends what you want to make. If you want to make something like a sphere, or mathematical shape, the Blender export tool is very useful. I think there is also a tool for 3dsmax around too. However, the problem is that it does not give you a very nice clean file. All the node names are just numbers, so it gets very hard to use afterward. To make a car, well, it takes a lot of time. After making some mods and doing a lot of tuning work on official cars, I can scratchbuild a rolling chassis of official quality (body with the right shape, suspension that works right, wheels) in ~4-8 hours. That is just to get the car sitting on its wheels/suspension, not adding all the extra parts or tuning the deformation, which takes longer. Here's how: First, I create a jbeam file to work in with Notepad++. I copy the relevant sections headings from other jbeams, no need to manually type everything. Then, by hand in notepad++, I add some fixed refnodes in the jbeam, and bind the flexbody mesh of the car body to these nodes. Then I add nodes where I think they should be on the car body and adjust the coordinates by hand until they match the body lines. CTRL+R reloads the car with the new node positions very quickly, and I just use the in game camera to move around the mesh. To learn where they go I started by analyzing the official cars that Gabe developed, and from there my own experience and understanding guides me. The tool (notepad++) is really not slowing me down too much, since I want to manually name the node anyways, and I want the coordinates to be nice clean, symmetric values. From there, I open the jbeam in Masa's editor, and click to add beams. I do it in an organized way by adding comments for every section. I also just do one side of the car, save, then to do the other side, in notepad++, I copy and paste, then use Find and Replace to change the names, (ie, change ["node1l","node2l"] to ["node1r","node2r"]. Masa's editor has easier to see visualization and it just makes things way faster than manually typing everything. Then in Masa's editor, I click to add triangles. I do one side, then can copy and mirror the triangles by doing a Find and Replace, and then swapping the middle and first column of the triangle definition to make the orientation the right way (green on the outside of car) ie: ["node1l","node2l","node3l"] becomes ["node2r","node1r","node3r"] Masa's editor has a few bugs, it sometimes has trouble reading files that BeamNG is able to, but it shows the error message in the bottom right corner. But overall, it makes things faster. Really, in the end, in my opinion its not the tools that slow me down making a car's jbeam, but the "engineering" (and trial and error) that goes into tuning it for the best behavior. As we get more cars into the game, we have many body styles for you to choose from if you want to make a similar car. In my opinion its better to take an existing offical car jbeam and move the nodes (as long as the shape is not too much different). You can use Masa's editor to better understand the shape of the jbeam when doing this too.
