Hey, everyone! I just discovered BeamNG.drive and immediately loved it, so I decided to download Torque 3D and see where all the magic came from. I realized that T3D uses a soldier model as the main player when you start a project, and got curious if that soldier could be brought into BNG, animations and all, so it replaces the current car in the game through a mod. Why doing this? Just out of curiosity mostly, but also I wanna see the capabilities of the game's editor, which as far as I understand, is just basically an improved version of T3D. Any info/tips wold be most appreciated.
BeamNG uses a highly modified version of Torque3d. One of these modifications was removing all files and code relating to the "soldier", for optimization IIRC. I believe that adding that functionality back would involve editing the physics engine itself , which the community cannot do as it is cannot be accessed by people outside the company for obvious reasons (If BeamNG made said engine public , they would likely go out of business). Sorry , but I don't believe it is possible for a community member to do this . The devs could do it in theory , but they chose to remove it for obvious reasons, and re adding it wouldn't be worth their time .
Thanks for the replies, I imagined that it wouldn't be that impossible, so I'll give it a try. I know that in Torque 3D we can import animated .dae models, do you guys know if that ability is still present in the BNG editor?
I don't think that would work, because all moving things in Beam3D are constructed from nodes and beams, there are no animations like in other games, but physical skeletons that react to forces, but you can then attach mesh to physical skeleton which will move as skeleton moves. Think it like bones in Blender or 3dsMax, but nodes and beams instead of bones. https://wiki.beamng.com/Content_Creation#Jbeam Oh and I have been dreaming about building mechanical devices, robots, all sorts of things, but I need to learn lots more to get really useful skeletons made.
Yeah, I researched this a bit more, and realized that if I want a model that crashes out of the car window or things like that, it has to be done in a similar way to the Stig model, so that's some homework for me. Happily, I have to report that I successfully imported an animated model into BNG, I just have to learn more about the navigation editor to make it transit a certain area of the map, so at least one of my doubts was resolved. And I've seen the main car be replaced by planes, helicopters, even a jetpack, so having it replaced with a walking figure (just for kicks), shouldn't be that much different. I'll keep working on it.
Also, to make Stig walk, he needs some motors to move legs etc. I guess you could put segway under him to make task bit easier, so that you don't need to worry so much walking and balancing that walking. Static map objects are then quite easy as those don't need jbeam skeleton, but they don't move so much. I'm quite interested to see what you can craft from it, because there is no walking thing that I know of, but also if one day there is, then this should be direction: (that is something I made in 5 minutes without any reference, also first ever of such I have made, so it is not very pretty)
That's an interesting model, i'd have no idea how to give it motor abilities, though, but it's definitely intriguing. As of now, I mostly want pedestrians in a BNG map, and I already imported a humanoid model walking, and it works perfect. I just need a path for it to walk over and possibly create a route for it, so it walks back after reaching a certain destination. Since I also want a custom driver model and creating a custom stig model seems way far from my current knowledge of things, I'm planning on importing a humanoid figure with a "steering arms" animation and place it in the driver seat (better than nothing for now). I still have a learning curve on how to put these models inside the car and stay inside it, as the animated model i imported had no collision, even though i did set it as "visiblemesh".. weird is that in Torque 3D this collision worked fine, but it didn't in BNG, hence I see that there are differences between the two versions. Like I said, I'm barely just starting getting into all this, I expect to report better results in the near future.
A bit of a bump here, but I'd be very interested in a 'walk' mode. It doesn't mean you'll be able to get hit by a car, but it'd sure be cool to walk around the city I am building "Los Injurus". Somehow, maybe one could combine 'The Stig' prop that's jbeamed and all, with walking mode/ability. Assign a new key, to create a unique camera mode, that will exit the vehicle, spawning the 'soldier' or 'stig' allowing you to walk about with the driving keys. When you go up to the car you could hit ENTER or any other key you want, and go back in it, taking away the solider or stig model and returning to normal play.
