you can either use it, which has a visual thing, or if you don't like the lag, you can just use notepad++, which doesn't have visuals. that's basically all.
My workflow: Keep Blender open as well as BeamNG with the vehicle's node and beam debug enabled Using Notepad++, copypaste a similar jbeam from an official car and delete all the unessecary stuff so you basically have an empty nodes, beams and triangles section (apart from one commented out in each so you can just duplicate and change the name) Get the node positions from Blender (either single verticies, multiple verticies or 3D cursor coordinates) and input them into the node position section and keep going until you have all the nodes done Reload as many times as necessary, the more practiced you are the less time you'll spend reloading Once your nodes are sorted then move onto beams, I usually do all my lengthwise, widthwise, verticals, outside bracing and inside bracing in seperate, commented groups. Keeps it much more organised than just randomly doing it, and if you need to change beamspring values for a section you know exactly where it is Coltris come last, fairly easy but can be very repetitive and boring One of your best tools with Notepad++ is find and replace (Ctrl-H), especially if you do one side and then copy it and simply change "_L" to "_R" My workflow is probably not the most efficient way, but I like how neat it turns out, and with some practice you can do quite a lot in a resonably small amount of time.
Damn, that's polished; I just manically/frantically hammer out nodes and connect the beams with semi-minimal organisation, I do make a lot of really vague //comments as I progress though.
90% of it is literally copypasting, changing one or two numbers and repeating endlessly until your hand is sore Main reason I never bothered with BNE is how it destroys the formatting and also how if there is a single tiny error it fails to open the jbeam file or crashes. I know some people do it in BNE and then copy it over into Notepad++, but imo there is no real time saving if you can do it without needing as much of a graphical view. My workflow also really shines when doing simple but large objects, this one is basically 3 rows split down the middle, so if you do it somewhat smartly it's pretty fast to chuck it together, took 3 hours from an empty jbeam file to what you can see here. However if you're doing a car with not much repetition, it takes absolutely ages
i know how to do that and all but my issue is when i hit the "refresh" button, some of the nodes and beams disappear. is there a fix for this at all?
99 times out of 100 that means there is an error in your JBeam that the editor is incapable of interpreting. For instance... One I commonly do is when I go to add new nodes or beams, before you start clicking away in the 3D window, you MUST click in the text editor first to put your cursor where you want your node or beam (or tri I suppose) to be placed. If you do not do this, for some reason the NBEditor will automatically stick these new lines of code at the very top of the file (even if you can't see it). This, naturally, is completely wrong, so when you hit the refresh button and it tries to read and display the file again, it will completely fail and everything will disappear.
Basically, load up the mesh in question from the mesh in question in blender. Once you do that, select the mesh you want to use. Then go to File>Export>Wavefront (.obj). This will open up another window, on the right side make sure that you have the "selection only" box ticked... or else it will export everything... then just make sure you save it where you can find it. In BNEditor, just go to File>Import .OBJ (or something like that... not actually looking at it as I am at work right now) but make sure its the import mesh and not import mesh into JBeam. If you select that one, it will take your mesh and attempt to make a JBeam out of it... which will probably crash it depending on how high res it is.
