Started the model and jbeam for a Daimler Ferret. I have been holding off making a post for it until I had something to show. Probably still not worthy of one yet. I imagine that I will be needing help/feedback especially for the JBeam, which I will do in this post.
I dunno, it seems worthy. Seeing as some people post with the front of their car modeled and no JBeam, you're doing pretty well.
Go for it, there seem to be many people posting images of a car bonnets so the model you have with a jbeam is fine. Your 3d model is very nice btw. I would suggest you get a second opinion on this since i could be wrong but your jbeam looks a bit too complex. When you start making really complex jbeams that have so many segments it becomes hard to maintain structural rigidity and the vehicle will become quite floppy and bendy. You may want to have a look at the pickups n/b structure, since that car deforms very nicely and has a lot less sections than your vehicle. The pickup is roughly the same size and only has 9 major segments length wise. I can count somewhere between 18 and 20 on yours. So i hate to say this but you may want to delete the node and beam sections of your file and start again (after a backup of course ). Since this is your first jbeam and the vehicle would not deform much irl you may want to keep it to more like 5 sections length wise. One thing to remember is your jbeam doesn't have to be as detailed as your mesh. It can be as simple as you like and the mesh will deform with it, it will just bend in larger segments. Just as an extreme example that i am currently working on here is a vehicle made out of two square segments, while i suggest that you don't use this design (for starters it has no suspension) i think it provides the idea. If you can aim for something more gabester styled though i suggest that you should do since what i have here is very very primitive. But maybe it might be a good idea to create something similar to this before you start work on your main project just so you can have a play around with something very simple before you build your main project. Since you will learn a lot from it such as not building your n/b backwards (did that on my last one, as well as many other things) because if you make a mistake on a project this small its much easier to fix and if you have to start over its no big deal.
I had been thinking that myself. I started working on the JBeam after getting the model to it's current completion. I then looked back at other vehicles and realised how over the top is was.
Completely reworked the beams and cut out about half the previous nodes. No longer runs when the physics are enabled, goes into a strange stop motion like behaviour between turning the physics on and off.
That physics on/off thing happens to me, mostly when I fall into water at high speeds or generally destroying the car so much the JBeam glitches out. Maybe there is something going on in your JBeam structure?
