Modders

Hey modders, what got you into modding? How did you learn to code and to model? Do you like it?

 

Nice crocs.

I just wanted to get my own stuff into the game.

The coding itself isn't too difficult; jbeam is more like markup than programming, save for the lua side of things. What I find a few people have issues with is wrapping their heads around the concepts that jbeam (n/b if you're OG) encompasses. Once you understand the fundamentals, it's matter of trial and error (and a generous amount of tedium). A good understanding of material properties, kinematics, and vehicle dynamics is also very important in getting a project to behave realistically. A background in the automotive industry or significant automotive knowledge also comes in handy to fast track you for the behind the scenes stuff.

Modelling is one of those skills that is easy to learn and difficult to master. Like many things, constantly challenging yourself is one of the best ways to improve your abilities and expand your skillset. I cut my teeth on Blender (which I still use now) for a couple of years before moving onto Solidworks and Maya for my degree. This helped me develop some best practices for geometry management, polyflow, and the overall 3d art pipeline, but there are plenty of 3d artists out there that are significantly better than me without any formal training.

No, I don't enjoy modding.

 

(I'm not exactly a modder, I just have one WIP mod.)
TBH, there really isn't a reason. I decided that I want to make a car and put it in the game, so I am currently in the process of making a car and putting it in the game. It's also a way for me to, as you said, learn to code and model, as I have never programmed anything or made a single 3D model before this.

 

I like being able to create something of my own in a game I love and have other people, even people I look up to, try out and enjoy those creations. It can also lead to cool opportunities, maybe even working at BeamNG in the future, who knows.

I learnt JBeam from editing official vehicles and seeing what things do what and how they're put together, that and help from the people in the MFD discord server. I learnt modelling from YouTube tutorials, the CG Masters Corvette course, many years of practice and from feedback and help from other discord servers. Textures however, I'm still learning with a long way to go till I'm good at it.

And yes, I almost always enjoy modding.

 

most modders say they do this for fun or for being able to share their work with others, but I can assure you it's clearly for money.

I don't think you guys realize how much modders make on a daily basis, it's astonishing.

 

I recently learned to mod after I watched a friend do some modding for a couple hours, it looked easy so I took the opportunity to make some things I wanted. I like tuning more then racing, so modding just expanded on the best part of the game for me. The devs filled the beams with notes to make things easy to learn/adjust. I can see blender giving me grief for months to come though, more then a couple times I inexplicably ruin the project and end up reloading an older version.

 

I would honestly like to know how much a modded can make off of one like dev quality mod

 

Simple start modelling take a coffee brake do some more modelling another coffee brake some more modelling for about 5 months and 75000 coffee brakes in between then start programming and then learn that you know nothing about programming.. so then you learn programming for a year (200000 coffee brakes) and then you think you know what your doing and then you start programming and it’s broken as hell so then you spend another 5 years trying and failing and then finally get it right then you release it and people report more bugs than there are molecules of air then you abandon the project and get a job :/

 

Yes, we make a lot of money from modding. So far I have made exactly $0

 

I've got into modding bcuz no one made the stuff I wanted, first with model ports and tipping my feet at jbeaming random stuff, after a long while modding privatedly and making 3 thousand billion experiments with different mods I decided to finally dig myself into proper modding as they say, I started modelling the models myself and then modifying to high grounds the jbeams I put them on, but I still want to properly scratch jbeam a full car one day. Is fun I don't recommend its pure pain and torture

 

that figure can vary a lot, but from my experience the highest you can make is exactly 0

 

"hey i wonder how difficult it would be to yoink this car from this game into this game"

- may 25th 2018 incident

guesswork and reverse engineering existing things, modelwork is more a thing you learn with time and a lot of googlework

 

modeling is easy, there’s a million YouTube tutorials on that. Doing the rest of the modding process is essentially impossible unless you’re good at reverse engineering, which I’m not.

 

I wouldn't say I'm a modder, but I had a few projects WIP and have 2 config mods on the repo, and no, I don't really enjoy it.

How did I get into it? Not much, I was really bored that day.

 

it all started when i accidentaly opened the beam debug, and i pretty quickly learned how it worked on a basic level. the first deliberate modding i actually did was a few years, later, when i realised you could do engine swaps.

 

Get help from other modders.

 

Wouldnt that be nice...

 

I got into modding because there was a lack of the type of vehicles I wanted to see in the game (bikes). Therefore the love and aspiration I have for bikes led me to create one in game. It got addicting.