So I'm pretty new to modding beamng. I'm upgrading an automation car. So far I have: -separated the hood to a new slot (with the intention of making it openable, but we'll see) -added working steering wheel, pedals, gauges from the bluebuck, along with their materials -modified the chassis mesh to look a bit more proper in the engine bay and also make a bump out to accommodate the rear of the engine without clipping -added working engine fan prop from bluebuck -added and modified engine bay meshes from bluebuck as decorative flexbodies (ie. they don't have their own slots or nodes etc, just want the engine bay to look real), along with their materials -added most of the interior as a separate flexbody (I didn't originally make a floor, rear seats, doorcards, roof/pillar liners in automation and once I got the steering wheel working I wanted to go back and fill out the interior. But since I modified the body and chassis meshes in blender, I would lose those edits if I added the interior parts in automation and reexported, so I cloned the car in automation, added all the fixtures I wanted, made the body transparent and then deleted the interior fixtures I already had. Then I exported that as a new car, went into blender and separated out the new interior, then imported that into my modified .dae, moved some vertices, closed some gaps etc. Then because it was from a 'different' automation mod, the material names weren't in the materials.json so I added in the references from the new (interior) automation mod to the old one (without interior) and dragged over all the .dds files from the new one to the old one and this worked) At this point in my journey I have a working automation car with a hood I can remove (but not open lol), working gauges, pedals, steering wheel and a realistic interior and engine bay. Woot. Now it's a new day and I want to get the manual shifter in. I had already copied the jbeam for the shifter over from the previous automation car I added one to. But I never added the flexbodies so I did that now. I realized I never moved the meshes, in blender, for the shifter into position. So I did that. I start up beamng and load in my car and now it suddenly has no materials on all the flexbodies. It does have the proper materials on the props though. I didn't make any changes to the materials.json since getting the interior working. The ingame console shows NOMATERIAL errors for a bunch of the materials that were part of the original automation export, not for any of the materials on the newly imported interior parts. But all the materials it lists are in the json and they are in the .dae in blender with their proper names on the meshes. The console also shows an error 'unable to understand vehicle path' but then references some mod that is not part of my car? Here's the console readout: I did do a deep cache clearing with no luck. I'm not sure what I goofed. Last night everything was good, today I edited the mesh in blender (moved the shifter) and added the shifter meshes into the transmission jbeam flexbody section (not sure if that's the best place for it, but that's where I stuck it in another automation mod and that worked). Then I loaded beamng. If I had started beamng first I would know if the changes I made today were the problem, but I didn't. The shifter works (I do need to move the nodes into the right place so it doesn't deform, but it still works and has materials) and now the materials on the rest of the flexbodies don't work, just the materials on the shifter flexbodies and the props, those work. Of note, I was lazy and didn't rename most of the stuff I took from the bluebuck, but everything seemed to work last night. Is that the root of my problem? Those are the only parts that have working materials now. I'll provide the zip for the mod if you want to take a look.
