Hi, One thing strikes me as very weird about the cars conversion...all the manual typing into the text files. So my question basically is - isn't there any tool that would automatically create the jbeams, some sort of a wysiwyg editor that would let you see everything, manipulate, align, set up all the connections...? How do devs do it? Modders out there, how do you convert cars to beamng without going crazy? I can't believe that the answer is "notepad"(++), but if that's the case, I can somewhat see why the cars are being added somewhat slowly. Modelling a car can take up a fair amount of time, but manually typing all the nodes afterwards seems a bore. Now I get that there's plugins that will create the nodes from meshes when exported, but it still seems like a better tool for that is missing. Some plugin...
You know? In fact, we do go crazy making cars. And the node exporter - it's trash if you ask me, even more work than making something from scratch since it exports all nodes in an unsorted, unnamed heap of junk.
I have never made a whole car, and probably never will, but I just use notepad++ for jbeam. IF I was making a car, I would take some othe car's body/frame jbeam as a base, and start building from there, with notepad++. Or if I was making something that doesn't exist in beamng already, like a european van for example, I would make the jbeam from scratch.
I noticed that haha! And it also exports everything, which probably might be taxing on the physical engine...? If you have a hi-ish poly mesh...I noticed that nodes are placed kinda strategically over the car, not at every vertex...so do you actually look at the model in Blender and guess what points will be best for nodes, click around and copy their positions? It reminds me of the first days of graphics...typing in coordinates of vertices of the teapot manually There's no way this whole process can't be simplified with an app of some sort. Something that would import your model, and you would have let's say some presets, the app would tell you to indicate what's door, where's the hinge, what axis it swings around, which object is the steering wheel, what axis, where's the left indicator, you choose some preset for the light turned on and off, or you can upload your own texture etc. This almost seems like the devs love the self-torture of this process. I thought the first serious job when creating a game is to create some user-friendly environment to do stuff in or to use an existing game engine. That's why Unity, Unreal etc. are so popular. So that one can focus on the actual art rather than having to fight the numbers equipped just with notepad. --- Post updated --- Lol I heard someone saying "that's how Russian mods are made" xD (take an existing car and modify it with the new mesh). Yeah, making something from scratch seems like an insane amount of work :O
That's.. how they are made, sure. These russian mods usually reuse the whole jbeam, including everything for body panels, suspension, bumpers, and wheelbase, even if those are nothing alike. They might also drag some nodes around without an idea what they are doing. That's bad quality, I tell you. Most official cars are based on each other tho, but they know what to make from scratch.
Well... the praSu is basically a 200BX (albeit with some parts being scratch-made), for example. Using a vanilla car to make something similar is not a meshslap but just common sense; Russian assholes don't care if the interior works, if there's any interior at all, or whether the cars are even vaguely similar - they even put an R32 GT-R on a Grand Marshal jbeam.
I remember this cool (European ) van called UAZ in Beamng, but it was shaking like crazy all the time I guess that was a meshslap ^^ I wish there was some compherensive tutorial covering every part of the car, from how basic texturing, bump maps, AO/diffuse maps, through things like how to position wheels, set up the chassis and even choose if the axle is live or swinging, to details like how to make pedals work properly, stick shift positions and such stuff... it doesn't make a whole lot of sense just by looking at the jbeam files. And there's also an issue with some missing parts, like some cars don't have anything mentioning "wheel" anywhere, I guess it somehow gets a stock set of wheels, but I have no clue what determines what in this weird structure. I guess we can be glad that the devs made modding even this accessible, some devs lock their games to various degrees so that you have to make some more effort to convert cars...
I agree that Beam's mod support and community is top-notch. When making cars, it is essentially a series of new parts; a beginner should ALWAYS start with parts for already existing cars, a spoiler being my personal preference when teaching. After a while, jbeam starts to make sense - experiment with things like hydros, propulsion types, and et cetera, and you get yourself a somewhat sufficient knowledge base for making a whole car.
So what car would you recommend as a donor for a european van? What should I start with? I see this HUGE mess of objects with any car I import and everything is connected to everything else and I don't quite know what does what (plus when I export it back nothing has textures so I guess there's some extra step missing)...
A van would actually be quite difficult considering that no vanilla car uses sliding doors, and the H-series' frame is nowhere near a European car. I would think about using the Ibishu Kashira G2 as a platform (Reziachan says anyone is free to use it as a base as long as it's sufficiently modified).
Actually luckily, it has standard rear door, although only on the right side (would that be a problem? Do doors need to come in pairs?) Another anomaly is that the back door (to access the cargo) is divided into two panels, the upper swings up, the lower swings down...if you know what I mean...here's a picture. Also, the engine is not in the front, but between the seats, covered with a cover. I guess that means it doesn't even need to be there?
Hmmmm an interesting car, I should say. The doors will be no problem and the rear hatch would be hard but not too much - the biggest problem, I'd say, would be putting the engine in what is essentially a midship layout.
Jesus Christ yes. They spend a long long time making the outside of the game usable, and its amazing. But for us modders, they have left us in the dust. I can model cars very well, but i know literally 0 people who can put said cars in the game. I have 2 almost fully modeled cars, and they will never go in the game because it is too difficult for people to implement them. The latter of the 2 cars is a super duper sexy and cool looking supercar that I'm modeling. If anyone knows anyone good at hydros please dm me --- Post updated --- The new Kashira mod has sliding doors as you probably know, and its super high quality. Just use those.
I'm not worried about the engine that much...as I said, it's between the driver and passenger seat, covered by a cover...unless I want to go super realistic and want to see it fly in high-velocity crashes... You can see the engine cover here:
Another thing I'm super curious about are things like rubber covers (for the stick shift base for example), springs, control arms etc. When I opened any official car, I could clearly see that they are one solid object, but in the game I can see them deform as the car moves...of course, the tires are squished as the car sits on the road, but that's PressureWheel sim...but how do they tell the game to squish the rubber cover on the stick shift base when gears are changed?? I didn't notice any armatures after importing cars into Blender...do they do it with a lattice of some sort? So many questions Edit: so for example I looked at the fullsize model at the part called "tierod" (tie rod that transfers the steering) and the ONLY mention is in the the fullsize.dae file (makes sense, that's where the model is) and then front suspension jbeam file. The mention is one single entry. I have no clue how the sideways motion is coded in when the steering wheel is turned. So I tried another object: suspension lower arm, which is a single object upon import, so it MUST be animated via armatures or lattices. However, again, the only mention of "lowerarm" is a single entry in the suspension jbeam file, so the code that makes it flex up and down must be somehow hidden. So actually I have no clue how to even edit those things so that they match sizes and positions and exact mounting points of my car, let alone create a new one from scratch I thought it was possible to somehow track every detail in the text files and by staring at it for long enough time (I code so I do that a lot), but it seems to be hidden, or is in a file unrelated to a specific car, but governs these things for every car as some kind of a wrapper.
I'm not helpful at all in that regard, but maybe @ferrettank would be able to help? (sorry for the ping btw. just had to)
BTW the beamng wiki says not to bother, that it will be replaced by a new documentation system. Here's hoping that they'll write a more complete and centralized documentation for vehicle creation. Currently it seems kinda scattered around, bits and pieces addressing certain elements, but no overall picture...or I just suck at reading documentations.
The wiki is too scattered to be of real help in its current design, I think the Devs are making a more cohesive wiki that easily flows step to step similar to Blender Documentation with the BeamNG Documentation website. Modding and adding a full car for BeamNG is very hard, I been modding for BeamNG for 5 years and still cant fully create a vehicle from scratch although I have some released but most of the jbeams are Frankensteined from official vehicles, I still get confused when adding more parts such as axles, wheels, powertrains, its akin to building a full car in real life, each part interacts with the other, not to mention in real life you don't need to necessarily know the physical metallurgy of a hood your replacing on your car. BeamNG modding is the cream of the crop of modding in general, you cant just drop assets into BeamNG as easy as Garys Mod or Skyrim, it takes detail and time lining up each node in notepad, setting the correct phyics, testing testing and testing. My mod took a full 4 years to mature, other modders with a team can take 1 to 2 years to achieve a stable release, most modders create a vehicle or two and move on. I created two and not looking forward to another . Its hard to mod for but a great game to mod for.
Well, I guess I can then either shelve my model until more compherensive wiki is released, or I can bribe a skilled modder with a crazy amount of money to implement my car haha (and not steal it as their own model).
Something I consider to be a good intro to jbeam would be to do something fairly simple that still requires scratch jbeam, but uses vanilla driving gear. The autobello buggy or the brawler would be two examples. https://www.beamng.com/resources/trackfab-autobello-buggy.9678/ https://www.beamng.com/resources/trackfab-brawler.11905/ The main issue with making a full proper car as your first mod, unless you plan on just modifying vanilla jbeam, is twofold: Making decent suspensions require a good understanding of jbeam, along with a good understanding of the suspension layout itself and the effect of various geometry changes. I thought I had semi-decent knowledge of suspension geometry when I started modding beam, with my degree in mechanical engineering and a few years of sim-racing, but I still had a bunch of weird problems early on with both the Superlite and the Unlimited. For better or for worse, there's a certain standard of quality when it comes to bodies deforming somewhat decently, unlike in ror where it wasn't really a major thing. This requires a lot of tuning and testing, and personally it's something I haven't played much with, other than reworking the Kashira's door and roof jbeam. The main protips I have when getting started would be : Node naming. This is a huge mistake I see a lot of people make, and it makes it a lot harder to fine-tune the whole thing. Looking at vanilla jbeam for reference is a good idea here. Beam organising and commenting. An other one I often see, especially if using the blender editor or NBE. Once again it makes it hard to fine-tune your structure. Jbeam doesn't need to be as precise as some people think it needs to be. At the end of the day the main goal is that it handles and collides correctly. Understand that jbeaming, kinda like modeling, requires experience. You mostly learn by trying things, seeing what work and what doesn't. More experienced users can defintively help show you the way, especially if you get stuck with something, but you have to be pretty good at putting in the time to figure things out by experimenting. At somepoint it kinda "clicks", and you start understanding how to make various structures work as jbeam. You can defintively get by for more basic stuff with the wiki, and I've also learned a ton of things just reverse engineering vanilla vehicles.
