Temporarly added some additional beams to front suspention to have it working until either macpherson support will be added to beamng or substitutional beams structure created.
Though the roof and pillars and all that do play a huge role in structural rigidity, I think the floor and quarter panel and firewall as you have them should be a bit more rigid (increase spring/damp or add more beams)
I don't know that an underbuilt 80s Hyundai is that comparable to a modern car that gets 5 stars in crash tests... But yes, even that thing looks more rigid as just a floor and firewall/quarter panels than your current structure.
Yeah, thanks for your reply, I agree, current beamSpring values are lower then expected. I will make it more stiff, also taking in account that picture posted on front page which shows location of additional plastic solidification parts.
Try not to get carried away with separate parts. I think you will find it creates a huge amount of problems. It's best to simplify.
Yeah, I see that I got carried away already - because I had almost complete body shell and then snapped into this splitting up theme ... But anyway, I like current jbeam structure more then previous one. I'm reassuring myself by future support of OpenCL so that this big amount of beams will be compensated by GPU computations. But for rigidifying elements - I agree. No new parts, I'll stick with parameterized beams.
hmm, a car body is a corrugated structure, if you ever played with a piece of cardboard you should be roughly familiar with it's physical properties. That video from Davesfarm shows it off, because you notice the car is flexing in one very specific place. so you bend a piece of cardboard and it'll happily oblige to a point until you end up folding it and removing the corrugations in one specific area. That area becomes a very flimsy point where the structure wants to flex which is why you see the car behave like that in that video. It bends pretty much specifically in the middle, where the car folded. But a car body is extremely rigid until you do damage it.
This video basically demonstrates the actual idea of modular construction of jbeam data, when it is possible to separate some part of a whole and observe how the model behaves in this case. Sure, this approach requires much more effort for each part then a classic one, because it is important to enshure that each part behaves as expected in different cases. Additionaly, the density of jbeam data is much higher then in case of classic building approach. So this project gradually becomes more like a some sort of load/stability/performance test for BeamNG engine, as well as for me
Once it is all put together though, will it behave normally, or will it all flap about like a garden shed in 90 kmh?
I think the parts are all still too floppy in isolation. For example, when you remove the thing that was holding the front fenders, they began to flutter around like paper. I suggest adding a node floating some small distance away or underneath, attached to every node of the fender with weak beams, to make it realistically rigid. I do this for pretty much all of my body panels.
The final model should behave as close to reality as possible, but I honestly don't even roughly now when it will happen Yeah, there are such support beams there, I've just definitely under-beamSpringed them. Generally this is common problem for all model - to set beamSpring to required level, I have to increase node weight above wanted. So to have proper stiffness, the mass have to be more then real. I suspect there is way to overcome this, but for now I've postponed this fine-tuning up until I'll complete all the drafts.
Current status of the car: Too heavy Too slow Too wobly Too fragile No new parts in a while due to nineteenth round of jbeam meshes refactoring Next steps: finalize/fix front and add rear bumper, headlights. Then, add hood and rear door. Then, add other doors. Then - proceed with interior. In parrallel - reducing weight and fine-tuning jbeam parameters. Update: picasso.0.7.1.M4-suspension.zip has small update to suspesion: several support beams to avoid instant wreckage, so that now it is possible to jump small tramplines on Grid map. However, front springs aren't overstiffened anymore, and as soon as there are no sway bar yet, driving straight is almost impossible. But rollovers are even more easy to do.
It's always more amusing with regular cars, more parts to fall off, you never know what extent of the damage will be if you hit that rock, etc. =P
There are 3 which I know of as 3rd party mod content, there are also mods to convert the D15 to a crawler.
