Making cars in Inventor?

I'm teaching a class on Inventor and my students are making their own cars. Is there a way to use these models in beamng? From what I can tell, I'll need to export them to DAE, but is there anything else?

 

They need to have good polyflow and preferably be detailed

 

Ah... This is possible, but your mileage may very...

Take this for example...


This is a Lamborghini Egoista that I made in Inventor... basically just for practice... No interior or anything... but that isn't the point right now.

First thing your going to want to do is figure out a way to export it. Inventor can export in 2 file types that I can see working for us to get this model in blender, and I am going to try both of them out right now because I want to be able to give a proper answer. The first is as an STL file, and the second is as an OBJ file.

Alright, I exported both of them, now I am going to fire up blender.



Importing into blender we can see that both exports worked just fine, but it is important to remember, if you texture your models in Inventor, the textures will not be brought across if you export your files as .STL files. That, plus the OBJ file kept all the parts seperate while the STL file made them all into one big blob.

So yes, you can export Inventor files into blender, and then in turn export them to .dae files for use in Beam.

That being said... while these make good stationary models....



Their polly flow is terrible...



So deformation, even on a 100% custom JBeam, will be questionable at best...

 

You can't easily make car to drive, but you can quite easily export it as decoration to map.

 

It would certainly be possible, but the models just aren't brilliant for deformation

 

I mean... if anyone wants to try seeing what it would deform like... you can give it a go on this model here... I would give it a shot but I just don't have the time right now.

(Yes I am giving full permission for anyone to do whatever with this model)