Blender to BeamNG Texture/Materials Invisible

Hey all, first post here because I'm at my whits end. I'm a programmer by trade and I really enjoy reverse engineering things to figure them out. Trying to do this with BeamNG mods has been a nightmare. I've been reading what I can on the wiki, but I can't seem to get anything to work.

So, I decided to try something super simple. I am making a cube, with a texture. What I have done so far:

1. Make a default cube in Blender (1/1/1m) and name it `test`
   
2. Add a material to it called `test_material`
3. Switch to UV Editing, make a texture called `test_texture`
   
4. Change my materials base color to an Image Texture pointing to `test_texture`
5. Export (using plugin) jbeam.
6. Export collada and texture

In Blender the cube looks exactly as I would expect:


The collision and nodes are working in game, but the object is invisible:


I would like to use materials 1.5, but I couldn't get the `main.materials.js` to work. Here is what I tried:

Code:

{
    "test" : {
      "name" : "test_material",
      "class" : "Material",
      "mapTo" : "test_material",
      "persistentId" : "e4371f2e-85d7-4247-b161-e0b746a9c246",
      "Stages": [
        {
          "baseColorMap": "vehicles/test/test_texture.png",
          "metallicFactor": 0,
          "roughnessFactor": 1,
          "useAnisotropic": true
        },
      ],
      "dynamicCubemap": true,
      "materialTag0": "beamng",
      "materialTag1": "object",
      "order_simset": 0,
      "version": 1.5
    }
  }
  

I also tried a `materials.cs`:

Code:

singleton Material(test_material)
{
   mapTo = "test_material";
   diffuseMap[0] = "test_texture.png";
   specularPower[0] = "15";
   useAnisotropic[0] = "1";
   castShadows = "1";
   translucent = "0";
   alphaTest = "0";
   alphaRef = "0";
};

Any insight on what I'm doing wrong would be greatly appreciated. Honestly I don't even want to worry about texture's right now. I would really be fine with a solid color that I can edit in game (ie car paint color). I'm not sure if I can do that without a texture image though. Please let me know.

Thanks!

 

Well, I think part of it was that I was missing the `flexbodies` tag. It worked for my cube, and for my more complicated project.


Next question is then, how do I do a solid color without a png texture file? Is that possible?

 

Hello there, this looks rather similar to the problem I had described in this thread...
https://www.beamng.com/threads/how-to-create-a-map-backdrop.95767/page-2

BeamNG wants for some reason this setup in blender, otherwise the materials are just invisible:


Afaik you need to set it up like this in blender: name your original Cube "test_a50" and then duplicate it, name the other "test_a500", the numbers refer to the Lod distance of the object. But for the sake of testing it does not really matter, just take random numers between 1 and 500. As long as you do not have a duplicate and both called xxxx_NUMBER like "test_a150" and "test_a300", the object will show up invisible in BeamNG. I don´t know why that is.

...and I´ve been using this template someone created for BeamNG. I don´t know if its necessary to use it because I have very little knowledge of blender but it worked for me.