hello everyone! An update on the progress so far, 11/26/2013 im about 80% done at this point with the mesh, I haven't even looked at JBeams yet but that will come soon. I've used lots of parts from the Covet and other cars so thanks and credit goes to Gabster and the BeamNG crew for their marvelous models! Some parts that I used are the wheels, brakes, exhaust (modified), seats (modified) and engine parts. Saved me much time in modeling. I hope to have the car in game by the end of December. i'll take what i learn from this project and then ill start working on my next secret project i think everyone will get a kick out of Some issues: trying to line up the panels perfectly, making thick panels and smoothing makes them look puffy, must clean up the color and materiel information (very disorganized right now). i'll have to learn how to normal map and texture the car, I should be onto that by the end of next week. Another problem I ran into was the shading and colors in game, I colored the car but when i imported the mesh into the game it looks very low quality. I think i have to put normal maps and such on the car first before it looks good in game?
Im using blender 2.68a, its free and comparable to 3DsMax and Maya, its the software of choice for lots of people. :links removed: It looks complicated at first and you'll wonder if you'll ever get good enough to make some really good stuff or good enough to put stuff in BeamNG. I say just go for it! make mistakes, get stuck, get frustrated, take a break and come back like i did just now, I'm resuming the project. The guys who made BeamNG didn't wake up one day and just make BeamNG, there was a time when they opened blender or C++ or Visual Basic for the first time and said "How am I going to learn all this stuff?"... yet they learned it all and now we have BeamNG! it takes time, I've been using blender for about 3 months and I still only know a tiny part of the software, I still need to learn texturing, High poly modeling, animating, baking, etc.. I figure that it'll take at least a year of blender before i'm even intermediate and I have a form of ADHD haha. So keep going and keep learning! Holland, I sent you the Blend file let me know what you think!
hello all! just some little update on my progress, I finished the trunk of the car the inner part and the outer. Modeling the outer shell took a long time but was worth it : ) the panels are all of center and require alot more work, and a host of normal's are pointing the wrong way haha I took some pics with various parts of the rear car. I,ll be finishing the front hopefully by the end of this week cheers!
yayy! more progress on my car, im stealing the wheels from the full_size and i will give credit where credit is due haha :I'm lining up the wheels so I can position the lower control arm and other parts right. The car is about 35% done I should have this in BeamNG by Mid December maybe earlier!
do you have anyy jbeam experience? The bottom of the car looks good I don't know if it's accurate though, I've never seen under one of those cars
Make sure your wheelbase, tire size, wheel size, and overall dimensions are correct as soon as possible, because it'll be a real pain to try and fix it later. The Elantra is a compact car so it doesn't make sense for the big wheels from the Grand Marshal (a full size sedan) to look like they fit correctly.
thanks all! Yeah I'm surprised I'm doing this well, I keep thinking of more and more stuff to add, I'm following the Grand Marshel closely to get an idea of ow everything whole look, the bottom is about 30 percent done, I need a little more detail because it looks really plain right now. I read on the Dev Blog that the wheel placement is very important so I'll be working on this aspect for now, for the correct tire size I may just scale the Grand Marshal tires to the right size for my car. as for Jbeam I have no experience at all in it, I have no experience coding. What I plan to do is study the Jbeam files of the beamng cars and try to duplicate that for my car, it will take a long time. I think I understand the concept: specify a part of the car > set properties for that part.
I would recommend reusing the floorpan and firewall .jbeam structure from either the Covet or Grand Marshal (they are very similar) and adapting it to the Elantra. You can also reuse and adapt things like doors, fenders, hood, trunk, and bumpers, if and where possible. You could probably take the whole Grand Marshal structure, remake the suspension to be correct for an Elantra, and scale the whole thing down in size and weight to match the real Elantra. Also, the Elantra has 4 bolt wheels, so you should use wheels from the Covet (they have the same 4x100mm bolt pattern). An important thing to keep in mind when scaling .jbeams: the scale values MUST match across all .jbeam parts for a given vehicle. If you have "scalenodeWeight":1.1 for a part, it needs to be 1.1 for every single part of the vehicle. This also goes along with a very important principle with our soft-body physics - if you reduce weight, you must also reduce spring and damp or the structure will be unstable and explode. I recommend using an advanced text editor like Notepad++, opening all of the .jbeam files simultaneously, and doing a "Replace all in all opened files" if you want to make a change to the scaling values. As for the visual component of the underside - the Grand Marshal is not such a good reference because it's a body-on-frame rear-wheel drive car, whereas the Elantra is unibody and front-wheel drive. If you can find a picture of that car flipped on its side, you will have hit the goldmine of underside reference There will usually be a lot of strange corrugations and indents, and I always do those in the normal map rather than modeling them. EDIT: Aha! Jackpot! Save this pic and study it hard... (imported from here)
It's a unibody, so in essence the floor, firewall, pillars, roof, inner fenders, quarter panels, and the rear understructure are all one "part", welded/bolted together. There are usually subframes bolted to the unibody that the suspension arms attach to. You can see them pretty clearly in the pic I posted.
Yup so ill be stitching the frame parts to the main body. I made some progress on the front part of the frame and i made a control arm, I had to stop because i'm still new to Blender and somehow I turned on "Move All Objects" and I don't know how to turn it off haha, Ill have to wait until I get an answer from the forums to continue, and then ill have to get an answer as to why my mirrors are acting wonky, You'll notice that there is only 1 lower control arm. When I try to mirror the control arm (and its completely 0 axis by its origin) it is still shifted too far to the right for some odd reason.. I hope to finish the front by the end of the day if I can get all my questions answered! Side Note: Blender is NOT user friendly, you spend most of your time messing around with the view ports and looking for common tools that should be right in your face at all times... there are many professional modelers trying to talk some sense into the Blender Devs but they all seem to be self righteous at this point and don't take well to outside critiques, ugh i wish i could afford 3DsMax as I hear glowing reviews about them. Anyway I hope it looks closer to that picture so far. Is that good detail for the bottom or should i have more/less detail? I will normal map it at a latter stage. Also how are all the panels on the BeamNG cars full? is there a fill function I use or do I have to duplicate and stitch each panel to make it have thickness?? (Picture below)
Looking good! Can't wait to see it make its way in game! For your panel thickness question: there's a modifier in 3DS Max called "shell." As far as I can tell, the Blender equivalent would be solidify, which (apparently) appeared in 2.5: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-256-beta/solidify-modifier/ Partially related: 3DS Max is free if you're a student, so that might be an option (assuming you're a student). I can tell you it's much friendlier than Blender in just about every aspect, except for it's FBX exporter, which likes to mangle .DAE files on their way out.
Detail/density on the underside looks pretty good, but you don't need to bother modeling any thin ridges or bolts, as those can easily be done in the normal map. You've gotten way carried away with the polycount on that control arm. I would use 8 sides for the cylinders, at most. It looks like you're using some absurd amount like 32
I got 3ds max for free as I am a student (not even on a relevant course). Yet to actually attempt to use it or even install it.
