I have a hood jbeam and a fender jbeam, how do I connect them? I need a sort of hinge so that they stay together at a corner until hit hard enough to break the hinge and the hood goes flying off, is that what "self collision only" is for?? when studing the beams of the beamng cars i see purple lines - are those hinge points??
I don't know if it's any different in BeamNG, but I fooled around a little bit making objects in Rigs of Rods a while ago. I made a refrigerator with two doors that would swing open with some force and break off with more force. All I did was make some edges ( Blender edges ) between the door vertices and the body vertices for a latch, then set those beams to break at a certain force.
i think this is how it works. each piece, fender for example, latches onto the main body through a node or a few nodes. same with the hood, it attaches to the body where it would hinge and where it would it lock, the lock place being a weaker node connection than the hinge node connection
ok but when i look in the jbeam file I dont see the connection referenced, for example the node on the fender is f3LL and the node on the hood is h2LL. there should be a line like this ["f3LL","h2LL] but i see no line of code like that.. where is the latch or hinge line of code?
I guess the hood and fender are just connected to the car body separately, not to each other? There are no latches or hinges between a hood and a fender usually. If you do want to connect the parts, just make those beams between them with relatively low beamStrength, in breakgroups so all the connecting beams in a hinge or latch break at once. Don't forget to close the group with {"breakGroup":""}, unless another group is right after it.
I hope im understanding this right, so the code would look similar to this: ["fullsize_hood","fullsize_body"] ?
If you are looking to make a "hinge" type connection, look at the jbeam for the D15, pickup_door if I remember correctly (I'm at work at the moment, so pulling from memory). You'll see the structural beams, then some support beams. The support beams are relatively weak beams (these are the ones that show up as purple in-game), and allow the part to "break away" from what it's tied to. They basically just hold it in place. Then, for the hinge, you have fairly strong normal-type beams holding two door nodes to a few nodes on the body. Then, you have slightly weaker "latch" beams, where the door would latch to the body, holding several nodes in place there. Same thing for trunks and hoods (look at moonhawk_hood and moonhawk_trunk respectively for reference), where you have support beams, then beams to simulate a hinge and a latch.
cool so I will try to create those types of nodes on some simple cubes then i will move to more complex objects.
Please forgive my poor MSPaint skills, but I thought this might help: Above is an attempt at recreating the front end of a car, with some nodes and beams to give you an idea of how to set it up. Green beams are normal type, purple beams are support beams, and obviously you'll want your actual hood much closer to the body/fenders than that one is. In my above example, the left and right hinges would both be in their own breakgroup, something like: {"breakGroup":"hood_hinge_left"} and {"breakGroup":"hood_hinge_right"}. The latch beams would be a separate group, and the support beams are just off on their own. MAKE SURE you close the breakGroups, as Miura said, with a {"breakGroup":""}. You put that code after all your beams in the breakGroup, otherwise the next Jbeam file you load will also be a part of that breakGroup. I made that mistake, and couldn't figure out why my suspension was falling apart when the door broke off. For values for the beams, I would base them off of gabester's vehicles - as far as spring, strength, etc, then tweak them until they behave the way that you want.
ok thanks! your drawing is great! that helps me out alot, im still trying to figure things out. i pretty much got the hang of the node system i just need to do a little more studying. Now the final frontier is the materials and colors section. how do I create .dds files?
