THIS IS A VERY OLD POST WHICH SHARES ESSENTIALLY 0% WITH THE CURRENT RELEASE (2.0) I'M LEAVING IT UNALTERED BELOW FOR THE SAKE OF REMEMBERING HOW BAD I WAS(am) AT MODDING. PLEASE DO NOT MAKE POSTS BASED SOLELY ON THIS POST, AND ONLY MAKE POSTS PERTINENT TO THE CURRENT MOD VERSION (2.0) Thank you. Now... Hey guys, I've been working on these off-and-on for a long while now, and I'm kinda stuck. (Cuz I kinda suck) I'm at a point where I need some outside help with a few things, I'll get into what down below... The mod is as the title suggests, leaf springs for the hopper. Sounds simple enough, but my modding skills are "meh" at best. There are a few small issues that are REALLY bugging me. (And have been, pretty much from the start...) In its current state the mod is roughly this far along: MODEL: ~95% Complete (Needs some fine tuning, and I need to figure out why the new draglink looks so awful) JBEAM: ~85% Complete (I need to fix tunable parts [off-road springs, trackbars, steering toe, etc.], add a few beams for the lifted and off-road springs, and get the short exhaust in-game. I may fine-tune reference nodes for some meshes to hopefully reduce wacky-warpage. I may need to do some clean-up as well, may still be duplicate stuff hanging around) TEXTURES: 0% Complete (I don't know how to do textures, how to unwrap, how to map, etc. etc. etc. and everything I read/watch makes me more confused) Some pics of the mod: Now you see me... Now you don't! Hopping around: Jbeam proof. It's hard to make anything out, but it shows the leaf springs are actually real. lol Axle "close"-ups below: Above is a spring-under-axle (SUA) setup, used for the default springs. Above is a spring-over-axle (SOA) setup, used for lifted & off-road springs. Both images are the rear axle. As you can see, all the standard hopper axle-attachments work properly. (Because they're vanilla hopper axles with vanilla pickup leafsprings "Frankensteined" onto them lol) The front axle with all attachments. Crooked driveshaft is painfully obvious from this angle. Here's the vanilla exhaust, hence the need for my shortened one. I don't THINK I need help with that, I just haven't started on its Jbeam. My alternate "side-exit" short exhaust. The issues I'm having: Alternate steering: The model bends in wacky ways: Very hard to see. Below is the actual model so you can tell what it oughtta look like. Also, the tiebar and knuckle-extension are missing and I don't know why they won't show up. The rest of the models were easy to get in-game. I've messed with reference nodes (The "group" section of flexbodies, and which nodes share said group) and it still bends like crazy. In fairness, the vanilla draglink bends too, but this is nuts! The issue may lie in the model itself... Front Driveshaft: It's crooked... It doesn't properly meet up with the transfer-case or the differential. I thought it was my duplicate in the .DAE, but even after removing it, it's STILL crooked. Shackle Mounts: The textures are all broken and weird. This pic doesn't illustrate the problem very well, this thing looks AWFUL in-game. The other one isn't bad, but when I mirrored it in blender, it's baaad. The Textures: Obviously the textures are missing or broken on a lot of these parts, and I don't know the first thing about how to fix them... Jbeam problems, no pics: The tuning menu doesn't work in any respect. You can't tune the steering, you can't tune the trackbars, nothing! I've looked around, but the Jbeam reference doesn't cover variables... If anyone knows what I did wrong, please help! Tunable off-road springs simply collapse upon spawning (I never made any for the rear because I never got the fronts to work) I assume the issue is tied to the other tunables not functioning. In conclusion/summary/what I need help with: (In no particular order) The new draglink model to figure out why it sucks so much. The new draglink Jbeam to figure out why it sucks so much. The driveshaft model to figure out why it's crooked. The tunables in the Jbeam to figure why they don't work AT ALL. Textures. Credits: BeamNG Devs: Everything Me: Bending existing assets to my will If you can't help me, I figure you can at least have fun with it, so I'm "beta" releasing it here. If I ever get it finished, it'll go up on the ol' repo. I'm too lazy to properly pack it, so here's how to use the attached .ZIP: Unzip the .ZIP with a .ZIP opener (WinRAR etc.), take all the files out and stick them in your "User/AppData/Local/BeamNG.drive/latest-version(0.23)/vehicles/hopper" then start your game and it SHOULD work. Have fun and pliz hepp mi!
All of your issues appear to be Jbeam-related, the model is all good. Jbeam can really mess stuff up if not done precisely enough, which appears to be the case here. I could see if I can fix anything later, but not sure, I'm not too good at suspensions.
the materials are the main problem jibbum seems usable to me. the offroad springs aren't really a necessity, though the tuning aspects could be useful
Materials are only a problem because for some reason he seems to have exported the working mod, then imported Hopper into Blender, deleted most parts, reimported the mod and then reexported that. It obviously messed up all material names because Blender never knows what to do in cases like this. Easy 30 second fix, just rename them back. Also flipping some faces could be needed because some parts were incorrectly mirrored. Jbeam on the other hand has a lot of issues that need to be fixed to make the mod releasable. It causes parts to bend, crook, become invisible or get completely messed up, and that's the main issue with it.
I fixed what I could... the thing is, most issues don't appear for me, like on my end all models look good aside from the alternate steering and nothing is invisible, and drag link Jbeam works for me... Must be a mod conflict on your end. I fixed all variables and all the textures I could (alt steering is way too messy for me), I kinda fixed the driveshaft but it's still weird and I have no idea why, the rest either works for me or I have no idea how to fix.
I never said "snip," that's a lie! lol. Thanks anyway, but I know how to pack it, I just didn't bother because this isn't a real release. Yeah, I know the materials are a problem, but I don't fully understand WHY. I know tunable springs aren't necessary, but I wanted them. lol The exact process was as follows; Import "hopper.DAE," import "pickup_common.DAE," steal leafsprings etc. from pickup, cram leafsprings etc. onto hopper, have fun. I edited a few parts to make them fit (kinda), and I did rename the stolen pickup-parts to "hopper_part" etc. I then deleted all the imported hopper parts that I didn't need for the purpose of aligning my stolen pickup-parts, and I deleted all unused pickup-parts. The model was imported and exported numerous times as I made incremental changes. In fairness, I don't have a very solid understanding of how to properly use blender. I'm learning, but it's a VERY slow process, so it doesn't surprise me that I broke the textures by accident. I don't know exactly what parts you mean. The leaf springs don't look (or fit) great, sure, but what else does it bend? How could you? lol I may have just needed to take another look at my "flexbodies" sections to make sure they were properly named/grouped... I had checked them several times, but I've found I never wind up checking them enough. The vanilla steering works normally for me, and my alternate steering works beautifully (in my opinion[less bumpsteer and less change to total toe with changes in rideheight]) but the model looks TERRIBLE. I even added fake (mechanically useless) reference nodes for my tiebar to keep it from bending, but I never even got it to show up, so that was pointless. The vanilla draglink bends at the knuckle-ends while steering anyway, but nothing like how my alternate draglink bends... The alternate steering model issues/texture, or the alternate steering variables/Jbeam? Its Jbeam is quite simple, it's about half as complex as the vanilla steering. If I knew how I broke/you fixed the other variables, I'd be better equipped to fix the alternate steering myself. lol What did you do to fix the driveshaft? I don't even understand why or how it got crooked... I never moved it or did anything to it. I may have erased some node that its model was tied to, but I don't think I did... Thanks for the help, and hopefully I can get this thing pulled together and released with the information you've given me thus far.
I didn't change anything in node groups, I just moved 2 nodes by 1cm to fix the driveshaft and maybe that made everything show up. Then I made a custom driveshaft anyway to make it more precise, but your diff model seems to be offset a bit so it still behaves weird. And your attempts at variables were a complete mess, there was a lot to fix. Also, suspension collapsing was simply because a critical part was unequipped by default, it was unrelated to the height variable.
I still wonder how it got crooked to start with... I'm going to assume the nodes you moved were at the shaft ends? I never moved those so I don't know how it got crooked. ItsYourBoi's hopper mod had the driveshaft crooked like that too last time I had it loaded. I don't know. It's still totally vanilla, I never moved it or edited it in any way. The diffs, anyway... I did edit the axles. Yeah, I don't know how variables work... There's nothing about them in the Jbeam reference last time I looked, so I don't know how I was supposed to learn. lol (other than doing it completely wrong and then asking someone for help... double lol) What critical part was it that I left unequipped? I tested it like 15 different ways (all combinations of parts equipped and unequipped, using the vehicle editor menu) and it never worked. Thanks again for the help, I need to actually review the changes you've made in-detail to try to understand how exactly (and where) I went wrong. I've been too busy, and with Thanksgiving being literally tomorrow (and IRL cars to fix... lol) I won't have time for a while... at least not this week.
