WIP Beta released LEGO Car (progress thread)

Theo Wilkinson · Sep 18, 2022

Agent_Y said: ↑

The reason is that I wanted to learn how to model better by making it, which has worked, I never would have imagined I would be able to model some of the more complex pieces like minifigure hair (which I can't include sadly). I know my modelling skills are far behind the other modders here but they have still improved a lot thanks to this mod.
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The Lego pcs are near perfect

joemamaa · Sep 18, 2022

Theo Wilkinson said: ↑

The Lego pcs are near perfect
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agre

Mikah 01 · Sep 18, 2022

Agent_Y said: ↑

I don't really know how to start a thread for a WIP unreleased mod, this is my first time so forgive me for the introduction being not the best
I think it's about time I've made a progress thread on this mod that I've been semi-secretly working on as my second priority project for over a year and a half now. This is the Lego Car.

View attachment 947042

The car is based on a custom design I have built originally many years ago and I've been improving it sometimes. The version in game is pretty close to the real one, the only changes I've done are the ones I wish I could do irl as well but can't due to lack of fitting parts. They contribute to structural stability and better visual look.

View attachment 947044

Video of the car in action:

Keep in mind that the car has adjustable strength and it is set to a really high value here, it's not so durable by default. Although it is true that it can take a lot of beating and lose many parts before it stops, regardless of set strength.

This mod is 99.99% scratch made by me. The 3D models of all the parts I made in Blender, using the real life version and some Lego store websites and blueprints as references. I didn't use any tools like Lego creator apps with export to make it easier, because I wanted to learn better modelling on this project, and seems like it worked out well. The materials are really simple and use mostly flat colors with some vanilla textures and a few normal and color maps for larger pieces, and slightly more advanced setups for the stickers. All the textures that aren't flat colors are either based on vanilla assets, or drawn by me in GIMP, or both. I plan on improving the materials after all of the pieces are finished, by adding some normal maps and ambient occlusion to make the pieces slightly curved on the edges and with better shading.

There is no single 3D model of the whole car, but each piece is separate and can be reused easily, which will make it easy for other people to make mods for this car later. Here's what the setup looks like in Blender:

View attachment 947050

It goes without saying that the Jbeam of the car is fully scratch made by me. (With the tiny exception that the wheel hubs are based on the Grand Marshal as I had no idea how to make them properly from scratch back when I made them. I corrected the geometry to fit this car after gaining more experience.)

View attachment 947052

Almost every piece is Jbeamed separately and can fall off, the only exceptions are the pieces that are really stuck together irl, they won't separate in game for the sake of simplicity. Each piece is super stiff, as much as the game engine can allow without instabilities, and nothing should deform on a reasonable use. 150 separate pieces can fall off in total. This is much more than on a normal car, so it's slightly more performance intensive (I experience a bit of lag with several of these cars spawned at the same time) but it's nowhere near as bad as some other mods I've used. The crashes can look really spectacular sometimes.

View attachment 947051

So far there is not too much variety in the mod, but that will change before release. There is only 1 main body style and a few others based on it with removed parts, in the future updates I want to add more body styles but it will be a lot of work. The models available are loosely based on 70s and 80s car design styles, the former being V8 powered and RWD, and the latter V6 FWD. Sporty models of both versions get AWD, they are not finished yet. There are automatic transmission variants meant for American market and manual ones meant for Europe. The amount of configurations and variety will increase as I add more parts. Some of these are just placeholders for beta testing some of the parts.

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Now here are some notable quiks and features of this car that are hard to find on other mods:

Adjustable weight and strength, the default being realistic for a car (1545kg or 2kg per basic piece, lights and bumpers break on small crashes)

All engine, transmission and brake values are adjustable, but in a much simpler way than in my other mod, allowing for easy tuning without having to change engine parts. But there are still various intake options which are also adjustable, ability to add nitrous, and customizable engine damage. Everything is simplified so that things like friction and torque loss don't exist, so the torque you set is what you get at the wheels.

Heavily customizable drivetrain. FWD, RWD, AWD, 4x4, various types of transmissions, transfer cases, differentials, disconnecting shaft options...

Implemented mileage simulation from my other mods. Additionally you can set the damage of the starter, head gasket, piston rings, rod bearings, spark plugs and injector.

Tires with adjustable friction settings, they are also supposed to be solid rubber tires with no pressure in them, but I had to leave some pressure inside to avoid issues.

The speedometer has no markings on it by default, and the value on the scale treated as the top speed is customizable, can be in metric or imperial units. Peak RPM on the tachometer always matches the engine. But marked non-customizable versions are also available in both metric and imperial.

Pieces of the engine bay can fall off, which will damage the engine to an extent. The carburetor on the V8 engine can fall off which will really damage it. Intakes can fall off which will break them.

Exhaust system is basically choosing where the tips are, and they are connected to the engine with invisible pipes. So you can have as weird of an exhaust outlet configuration as you want, derby stacks, front and rear fender exhaust, and side, center or twin upper exhaust on the back, 11 outlets in total.

There is no suspension, the wheels are attached straight to the axles (with "cheaty" hubs to allow them to turn) which are stiffly attached to the chassis. The tires somewhat act as suspension but pretty badly, might improve it in the future. Everything else is as solid as it can get with this game engine. There are lifted axles with fake suspension textures too.

Rear wheel steering is available, both as Pessima-like AWS and crawler-like mirrored front steering. This was just natural to add since the front and rear axles are exactly the same.

Modular separable unibody, you can mess with parts that would be inaccessible on a normal car, such as the bulkhead, rockers, B pillars, firewall, squab panel, individual pieces of the trunk...

Animated Lego fire appears on the fuel tank when it gets ruptured. You can add lego afterfire to the exhaust, and lego nitrous fire of various colors.

Everything in the interior is physically simulated and animated. That includes the shifter, which acts realistically for automatic and manual transmission. When an interior piece falls off it stops being animated and becomes loose. The doors can open by key bindings too as long as they are attached.

There are custom engine sounds recorded from the real life version of the car. So it really sounds like a lego car would a bit. The sounds so far only work on the V6 engine, I need to make different ones for the V8.

It has real Lego colors selectable. Not the official names due to possible copyright issues with that, but still. That includes the gold color and the metallic ones.

Various parts have variants of different colors selectable. Most often it's the 3 color palettes, light and dark grey, and black. It's not that revolutionary but it's cool and good for customization.

The police skin have a roof number that you can set in tuning or generate a random one, credits to Inn0centJok3r for help with the CSS for the texture.

According to several people who saw my screenshots, it crashes like a Lego car would, I don't know any other mod that does it lol.

View attachment 947072

Some questions you might have now, will expand it into a QnA section if more arise:
-Why are you making this? Several reasons. Because nobody made it before, because there are way too many normal cars in the game and not enough weird ones, because I always wanted to have my Lego car in the game, because I want to smash Lego cars and not worry about finding all the pieces afterwards and putting them back together...
-How did you make it crash like a lego car? By making it out of many separate simple pieces that don't deform and can break off, making all connections the same strength except some naturally weaker ones like single stud connections or large to small pieces, making everything very stiff and having a realistic weight distribution and consistent scheme of attaching the pieces. I wasn't sure it would work, but it did.
-Why does it wobble when static or driving slowly in the video? It has no suspension so the tires suspend it and they are not really doing a good job at that. Maybe I will fix it in the future if I figure out how.
-Will it be on the repository? Yes, but it won't be called 'Lego Car' due to copyright. 'Toy Building Block Car' will be the official name.
-Can you add a driver? Unfortunately, having a Lego minifigure as a driver won't happen due to it being a patented design. It's a real shame as it was already in the mod and I had to remove it. But I am working on a custom lego crash test dummy as a driver instead.
-Why does CrashBoomPunk have the mod? He is my friend, both of us as well as our other friend who makes his video subtitles have agreed to give it to him to boost his views, as his channel is performing not as good as it used to. Please don't make a discussion about this in the thread.
-Will it have that meme Lego breaking sound? I have no idea if I can include it when the mod goes on the repository, and not sure how good it would sound in game, so for now it probably won't. We'll see about that though.
-Will it have a taxi version? It would make no sense as it has only 1 seat. In the future I will add a wagon body with 2 seats and that can be a taxi then. But that's probably way after initial release.
-Can the wheels be used on normal cars? They can be used on center lug wheel hubs, so they fit both Civettas, the new Pessima and some mods. If you use my mod for wheel hub swaps, they will work on any car. (Unless I break them and forget to fix which has happened before with the wheels I make...)
-When will it be released? I will release when the todo list at the bottom of this page is completed. I have no idea when exactly it will be because it's a lot of work, but expect several months, maybe even a year. I don't want to release it in its current state because customization is one of the key things I want it to have, it just really fits the theme of the mod.
-Is this harder to make than a normal car? It's certainly different. I have never made a normal car from scratch so I can't tell, but I imagine that the advantage is that you don't have to do any research on how similar cars work in detail and you don't have to worry about deformation, but on the other side it requires way more creative problem solving because it gets issues that would never happen on a normal mod and they need to be fixed, and it has to be much stiffer than a normal car so you need to be more careful to avoid instabilities.
-Does it have a crumple zone? Idk who would ask that but I just wanted to point it out for the cool picture below, it kinda does but it's more like a shatter zone. It keeps the driver safe alright, and it's the same in the irl version. This is totally not a happy accident. (Remember that the driver will be changed to a dummy, the picture below is outdated.)

View attachment 947073

TODO LIST (PROBABLY NOT COMPLETE, MUST HAVE FORGOTTEN SOME THINGS):

Get dummy in game with good Jbeam, add crash test skin and config

Add all kinds of skins to be used by future configs

Add police parts, lightbars and configs, with good customization and many variants

Add FBI parts and configs, concealed flashers, working guns

Add Sheriff and Fire Chief parts and configs

Add sport parts, finish sport configs

Add drift parts and drift config

Add race parts, widebody fenders and fender flares, race wheels, trackday and race configs

Add pace car, amber light bar

Add electric parts and configs

Add fuel economy oriented parts and config

Add beater, rusty, dirt racer, derby and crazy derby parts and configs

Add proper drag parts and configs (V8 RWD, V6 FWD, electric AWD)

Add various types of wheels and tires, small, big, donk, offroad, etc.

Add off-road, baja and 'crawler' parts and configs

Add stock car / NASCAR parts and config

Add rally parts and configs: amateur rally, normal rally and group B rally

Add tuner, sleeper, street tuned, ricer and bosozoku parts and configs

Add hillclimb parts and config

Add tow hitch and small trailer (designed irl already)

Fix any bugs I find meanwhile

Record and edit V8 sounds

Update the default config with any changes I might do to the irl car

Bake normal maps and ambient occlusion to make the model look better

Prepare the Blender file for public upload so others can make mods for this car easier

The above list is not in order and anything about it is a subject to change, however until the whole thing is finished I can't release the mod. I will be reporting major progress here and crossing out the parts of the list that are done.

View attachment 947082

Credits:
BeamNG - some default assets
Felipe Maciel - feedback and some stuff for the minifigure that I had to delete unfortunately
CrashBoomPunk - beta testing and showcase
Inn0centJok3r - CSS for the police roof number texture
SKB - feedback and ideas
Me - everything else

View attachment 947085

I wonder if anyone reads this whole thing, it took me like 2 and a half hours to write lol
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Can you make a police version that's blue with white door and lightbar

coolcarguy#1 · Sep 18, 2022

noice.

ryanisstigg · Sep 18, 2022

time to recreate the dumb crap I did with LEGO cars as a kid (ripping their roofs off via slamming them into a low hanging edge)

Agent_Y · Sep 18, 2022

joemamaa said: ↑

you should also release the lego minifig on the forum page
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I don't want to risk that someone would record a video with it and get sued because of me, so no

Mikah 01 said: ↑

Can you make a police version that's blue with white door and lightbar
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You mean like the real lego police sets? That's planned

Antoniboii · Sep 18, 2022

what...

John Sandro · Sep 18, 2022

BriNG Rigs Drive

Mikah 01 · Sep 18, 2022

Agent_Y said: ↑

I don't want to risk that someone would record a video with it and get sued because of me, so no

You mean like the real lego police sets? That's planned
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Btw kemro did a Lego police lightbar for the wendover

Btw Can you maybe make a limo and a sedan ?

Agent_Y · Sep 18, 2022

Mikah 01 said: ↑

Btw kemro did a Lego police lightbar for the wendover

Btw Can you maybe make a limo and a sedan ?
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Other body styles will be in future updates after release because they are just too much work to delay it initially, but a lot are planned including limo and sedan + a lot of others

Panswi · Sep 18, 2022

It will be a very interesting mod.

Mikah 01 · Sep 18, 2022

Agent_Y said: ↑

Other body styles will be in future updates after release because they are just too much work to delay it initially, but a lot are planned including limo and sedan + a lot of others
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Okay

Btw the car seems to be a sedan. It's just that the rear is so tiny , it doesen't look like a sedan

Agent_Y · Sep 18, 2022

Mikah 01 said: ↑

Okay

Btw the car seems to be a sedan. It's just that the rear is so tiny , it doesen't look like a sedan
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It's a coupe, sedan would have a longer wheelbase and 4 doors

Porsche lover · Sep 18, 2022

Something I never knew I needed

IDK158 · Sep 18, 2022

JIMNY BRICK-IT!

jasel · Sep 18, 2022

fun! it might be popular in a lego city map

Agent_Y · Sep 18, 2022

Progress update 1: Started the dummy Jbeam. Torso is done and half of the head too. 7 separate pieces so far. The arm joints, head and spine can rotate, reused animation setup from back when there was a minifigure driver but I'll need to edit it later to fit the dummy. Of course everything here will have to be tweaked after the whole dummy is finished, during the testing.

BossBossChaser · Sep 18, 2022

Where is the download link

Nazu · Sep 18, 2022

BossBossChaser said: ↑

Where is the download link
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do you not understand what WIP means?

Agent_Y · Sep 18, 2022

BossBossChaser said: ↑

Where is the download link
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Read the FAQ on first message

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