WIP 1894 Benz Velo

A fun little car I made, still WIP.

Video:


Pics:





Progress: models, textures done (I might add a convertible roof if I feel fancy)
jbeam almost done, some of the transmission variants need to be jbeamed (but that's just a visual thing)

Features: fully jbeamed engine action and transmission. Fully animated chain drive. All engine components are jbeamed, incl. cooling (expansion bottle, water evaporator, water tank), intake + carburetor.


The engine's piston oscillates back and forth, the connecting rod is attached to the camshaft and flywheel, the RPM of which matches the engine's RPM. Video showing the engine parts:


The transmission consists of several belts (forward belts are twisted) that wrap around the differential and are tightened by selecting a gear. The transmission script was overhauled to reflect these features (slippage sounds, belt snapping after rubbing it for too long) etc. Check out here to see it in action: ,,

 

This showcases extremely well how beamng could be used to showcase antique vehicles that nobody could realistically get their hands on otherwise.

this is beyond insane and i never imagined to see such amazing re-creation of an antique vehicle, along with everything that made it work, simulated.

kudos to you for this really awesome detailed creation.

i cant keep my eyes off the belt. my mind is blown seeing this in beamng. incredible creation!
cant wait to get my hands on this antique and see it in action for myself.

keep up the great work!

 

Wow, this is amazing! The fact something this detailed is being achieved is just incredible. Hope to see this progress more

 

That's very kind of you!

Keep in mind, that animating the belts is quite heavy on the CPU (though I believe it would be possible to properly implement something like that into the game "officially", it would be well optimised and would take almost no resources). The 3+1 transmission (4 belts total) brings the framerate on my machine from 120 to 60, with 3 belts my framerate hovers around 70-80.

That's why I'm also keeping the "simplified" versions of the transmission belts, that just swap 3 versions of the texture according to engine's rpm (glowmaps).

I think the best solution would be to animate smooth texture sliding (this could be used for V belts as well). Next up is similar to my nodes animation, but done properly, through game engine's core, where more optimisations could be done.

 

Wow the level of detail on this is insane.

 

Looking very forward to this, it looks amazing.

 

peak 90s Mercedes cool factor

 

I'VE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR ONE OF THESE AAAAAA
Seriously, this is awesome. Can't wait for more updates!

 

this is looking super nice! im hyped for this! good job

 

This project leads me to something, we need more cars from the 1900s-1920s on the Forum.

 

Cant wait to run this as my nurburging track car

 

this may be dumb but can we also have a potato pc version

 

now this is the old car I needed.

 

i am beyond impressed. keep up the good work

 

This is absolutely incredible. I have been attempting... for a very long time now... to create belts with flexbodies in Beam to absolutely no success. Would you be willing to go a little in depth as to how on earth you made your belts so perfectly? I am very interested in this as my tracks at the moment look rather janky as I am using just blocks of tread as my tracks rather than actual flexbodies like I would Ideally want to use.



This is what they look like currently. You can see the individual blocks I had to use to get them to look half way decent.

 

does the amg model come with a turbo

level detail in this is absurd for something this niche

 

That's a little hard to explain...let me try. It's done with a combination of jbeam and lua. In jbeam, there's two types of nodes: guiding nodes (have physics) and flex nodes (guide the flexbody).

Jbeam provides the nodes, that create the outline of the shape of the belt - this can be rather low poly and isn't tied to any flexbody. There's two rows of nodes outlining the belt's shape that wrap around the transmission cylinders. These nodes are subject to physics, i.e. they are connected to each other with beams, connected to the axles, but they do not slide around.

The lua script now takes a bunch of other nodes, tied to the belt's flexbody and guides them through the guiding nodes, adjusting their position (otherwise these "flex nodes" are defined as static, so they don't have physics on their own).

The key thing is that the engine's rpm dictates the position along the guiding nodes where the flex nodes are projected, as to simulate the belt's motion, this is how the belt running around matches the engine's rpm.

The belt wobbles around with car's vibrations, because the guiding nodes are fixed to the axles, so they feel the vibrations and the script projects the flex nodes between the guiding nodes, so ultimately the flex nodes also experience these vibrations.

The script itself is not very complicated, initially it finds all the guiding nodes and then in each time step it calculates the belt's displacement (from the angle of the camshaft and gear ratio) and then it projects all the flexbody nodes onto the guiding nodes.


Since we're talking about this, the chain script works similarly, but somewhat simpler: this time there's only one layer of guiding nodes, however, each chain link is assigned as a flexbody to two pairs of flexbody nodes. The way the script knows the orientation of chain link is via inclusion of special soft rigidifiers on each side of the chain, so the script knows what the "normal direction" to the chain is and also, the rigidifiers prevent too much lateral flex in the chain. The immersion breaks if you jerk the chain around too much, but with normal use, it looks very convincing. The chain can fall off if you crash the car in which case that "half axle" will be broken. Chain still looks legit even if it's crumpled on the ground, due to the rigidifying nodes keeping track of the normal direction.

This probably didn't help much :/ but when it comes out, you can check it for yourself!

 

If I have a couple of suggestions, maybe make the lamp glow radius smaller so it's not so bright, and also maybe some colorable/black rims with white rubber tires as an option. Otherwise, this thing is awesome!

 

I want to redo the lamp glow, it flickers too much. I'll think of something better, but the game (AFAIK) doesn't allow brightness to vary smoothly, so I have to just turn some additional lights on and off to simulate the flicker.

As for the wheels, I'm planning on adding the colorable option as a secondary color.

 

A great addition to the 1900s car mods collection