Maluch JBeam rebuild

Good idea, I think the Piccolina was never designed to have front hinges, so it's a structural fault that is simulated in game, so I shouldn't have used its hinges for the Maluch. Noted, will use Miramar ones instead.

 

Tried using Miramar hinges, literally no difference. Then I realised something.
The reason why in real life door hinges don't break on crashes, is because the doors don't move forward compared to the rest of the body. And they don't move because they hit the fenders that deform outwards. That's the purpose of the fenders. The same thing happens in game.

But if you remove the fenders, the doors don't hit anything, they don't lose momentum with the rest of the vehicle, and are held in place only by the hinges, which are too weak to hold them and break:

So my issue is not with the hinges, it's because the fenders on this car are welded to the chassis so they don't deform outwards, I have no idea how the designers of the car solved this issue, but I assume it was done the same way as in game the devs did it on the Pigeon. So I have to look at that for reference instead of the Miramar.
EDIT: The Pigeon simply deforms less because the frame below the hood takes the impact... So no idea at all
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Apparently irl this little piece here is supposed to reinforce the hinges in a crash... Does anyone have an idea of how that would work?

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I'VE GOT THIS! Miramar-like hinges, but the lower is stronger than upper (simulating that support piece), they turned out super strong compared to the latches, so I strengthened the latches too, and now doors no longer break off!

 

The thing is that the Miramar and Piccolina have a completely different approach to hinges, and I assume the Piccolina one is more realistic since the Jbeam of this one is newer. Fenders are supposed to protect the doors, in the Miramar they don't do their job because the crumple zone doesn't affect the hinges, they start behind it so only a side impact can damage them. Which I don't think is too realistic. But the Miramar has an advantage over Piccolina, in the way that the solution used there seems more logical and less hacky, like they didn't purposely try to get the hinges to break on a hard frontal impact like they definitely did on purpose on the Piccolina. The hinges on the Maluch visually resemble the ones on the Pigeon, except the Pigeon has only 1 hinge per door because it's cheap, and they don't break off because the crumple zone is further away from the cab, due to the frame filling the rear engine bay like a cage (and idk if you can even call it engine bay since the engine itself is in the transmission tunnel below the cab lol). So I couldn't use the Pigeon solution as it's drastically different. The Miramar one didn't work at first either, because I didn't completely think through the way it's adapted into the Maluch. There were a few more factors to consider that are not so obvious and I missed them the first time I tried it:

• The lower hinge on the Maluch is actually positioned way higher than I initially thought, so the deformation of the fenders in the lower part doesn't affect it that much
• The floor is way stiffer and stronger than the fenders and A pillars, same with the roof, if you look at the crash test video they don't bend at all, not even for a short while. Granted it's only 40 km/h impact, but the Piccolina floor isn't as sturdy and especially the front part of it can bend way easier
• Generally the distribution of stiffness is way less even on the Piccolina than on the Miramar, which is more realistic, but also makes it harder to swap parts between them like the hinges in this case
• The Miramar has no distinction in the bulkhead area of which part is Jbeam-wise supposed to be the lower bulkhead and which is the firewall. Which is maybe not too realistic but makes it easier to set up the hinges since they can be attached to whatever and it will all deform the same way. The Piccolina has a clear distinction so different beams in the original hinges needed to have different properties. On the Maluch additionally there is the lower windshield mount and the welded fenders, which makes an even bigger mess lol
• The Piccolina has a sturdy steel subframe in the suspension that reinforces that area, on the Maluch there is no such thing so it naturally bends more in the suspension mount area, maybe the steering rods mount protects it a bit but not really, the spare tire is above that place and it cushions the impact to much greater extent than on Piccolina
• There is that small support piece which I still don't understand how it really works, but it's supposed to dissipate the deformation before it gets higher to the hinge I think
• For some reason which I don't understand, both hinges on each door of the Piccolina act as one, so they break at the same time, unlike in all other cars. I have no idea why that is a thing, but it means that the lower hinge breaks the upper one. I fixed that issue too but at first it didn't help by itself
• While the Miramar has evenly distributed nodes in the bulkhead/firewall area, on the Piccolina on each level there are sometimes 6, sometimes 4 and sometimes 3 nodes. That makes it much harder to find where the upper hinge should attach. I could have just attached it to the same nodes as originally, but I wanted a clear pattern like in the Miramar instead of a big mess that I wouldn't understand. Now at least I get how the hinges work, like what are the angles in the geometry that keep the doors in place and openable properly. With the Piccolina Jbeam I didn't understand it at all.

About door frames: You can't just swap one from one car to another, because the door frame nodes are also the side nodes of the floor, bulkhead, firewall, A pillar, B pillar and roof. And in the case of the Maluch, also the lower and side windshield mounts and the front fenders. So fixing 1 thing there could break 9 other things, exactly like my fix of the steering system broke the entire front of the car and the weight distribution (which probably wasn't fully correct in the first place but still). It also means that the door frames of the Maluch are modified so much now that they aren't comparable to the Piccolina, so I wouldn't find out anything useful when comparing it to the Miramar, because it's as different from the current thing as the Piccolina... Remember that my front fenders are scratch made, that's also a factor that makes it different. But generally door frames are NOT EVEN THE PLACE WHERE THE HINGES CONNECT TO IN GAME, so it would be pointless. They connect towards the middle of the car, so the floor and firewall. The reason is because we need to secure both hinge nodes in all 3 directions to prevent wobbles. Generally securing a node like this is done via 3 beams that all have 90 degree angles between each other. But here it would be tricky since you would have to connect the lower hinge to a rocker node in front of it or behind, to the floor towards the middle of the car, and then up to the A pillar or the roof, which you can already see that it would have unwanted side effect like A pillar deformation breaking lower hinge that shouldn't realistically be connected to it. So what is done instead is having 4 beams per hinge. For lower hinge there are 2 nodes in the floor that make about a 90 degree angle between each other and the hinge, and then on the firewall 2 nodes exactly above them, with about the same angle, and the angle between the lower and upper hinges is less than 90 degrees, but since there are 2 nodes with the same angle as the ones below, it's also properly secured against wobbling. For the upper hinges the same thing is done except it's the top and middle of the bulkhead. And in order to prevent a situation where one of the hinges breaks and the door can freely rotate on the other one, additionally the bottom hinge connects the top one to the floor the same way, and the top connects the bottom one to the firewall. As for the latch, it also doesn't connect to the door frame, because it would be too close to it and would cause vibrations, instead the connection points are further behind the B pillar. So I hope you can see now that the door frame is irrelevant here lol.

 

Actually suspension should have as little nodes as possible, often certain nodes are reused for multiple purposes. The wheel hub needs precisely 4 nodes for geometry setting, the other needed nodes are just the lower and upper mounts, and the shock mounts that double as mounts for everything else above the suspension. Additionally the steering system could have from 4 to 6 nodes depending on the setup. So the whole double wishbone front suspension could have as little as 13 nodes in total. The subframe usually has more. The reason why it needs as little nodes as possible is for stability reasons, because with less nodes you can have more weight per node, and that means you can make it more stiff without risking instability.
And yeah the Miramar is "ancient" and its behavior of not needing fenders to protect the doors is probably outdated, but it works in my case and idk what I could do otherwise.

 

Yeah I get that it's weird how the node positions are a compromise between several things that use the same nodes, because the amount of nodes must be kept to the minimum in a lot of cases. Sometimes it even sacrifises the visual suspension movement, if you look at some cars you will see that they can look weird in compression or when turning. And if you don't follow the rule of reducing node count, you get low mass per node, and stuff like the old wobbly front suspension design I made myself for this mod, before TrackpadUser designed a superior one and told me how to make it.

 

A lot of progress today. I improved the roof rack Jbeam, and started adding TAN's textures in game.
Manufacturer logo on glass:

Better radio texture:

And way better textures for dashboard controls:

And yes, the handbrake light works now!

These controls also have corrected slots system to properly show which trim had which controls.

There are still lots of textures to port, I'll do more tomorrow.

 

Very WIP

 

Door panels pretty much completely redone. This includes the model, material and texture of the main panel, model and texture of the compartment, model and position of the window lever, and position of the interior door handle. And they are still skinnable with the same color options as before.

 

Thanks for this, will come in handy! Do you have a reference of where each sticker should be? Because so far I only had 1 random image of it without context, and I used that for the texture...

Edit: Apparently I can't use these because the glass models are so badly made that I can't make a good UV for them, someone would have to redo all the glass...
I think I'll just add them as separate models
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Ok so I added the high quality glass logo to all windows:


Heated backlight has orange version:


And it's possible to change to the alternative version of the logo:

 

Gauge lights working again with new textures, kinda janky but will have to do for now... No idea how to make it look like the real ones where each light illuminates the whole cluster