Maluch JBeam rebuild

Pigeon is smaller but its suspension is made for heavy-ish weight, no use trying to use its suspension. My initial design of the leaf spring was based on it but it was bad and inaccurate. Wigeon has basically the same suspension but tuned for much lower weight. Generally I don't need help with nodes because everything is already placed pretty much where it should be, the issue is with the beams as they matter way more in suspension.

Where did you find this image, I've been looking for a reference like this, it shows exactly where to position the transmission mounts, and also shows that my fuel tank position is off, here it's REALLY dangerously close to the suspension, and also this shows some pipe at the other side of the car than the fuel tank, what is that? This really helps but also raises many questions and means I have to redesign some stuff and possibly take the fuel tank model from another car to fit the geometry like this.

 

Interesting, so it has the same heating pipe as the Piccolina and the Beetle have, going from the engine to the dashboard? This explains the existence of the floor tunnel despite the lack of long driveshaft. If this is the case then I won't bother making it a separate part because thermals are not simulated for the whole vehicle yet anyway so the absence of this pipe won't make any difference.

 

I always wondered why the tires that are in the model were not used in the mod, so I added them to check. Now I see why.

They are tiny lol, after rescaling them to the same size as the wheels so they fit properly, they turned out to be 135/45R12, while the normal ones are 135/80R12... In other words, the originals are 240mm in radius, while these are 215... I'll keep them because they are funny lol

Also sorry for general lack of progress, I'm having a busy week

 

Kinda ugly but good enough I guess, modified model and textures from the I-Series fuel tank, looks janky because I had to fit it to this messy and wildly inaccurate model and after that it turned out that it's clipping with the underside which I didn't notice due to it being a separate model that doesn't fit the rest geometrically, so I had to improvise to fix it. I guess this is better than nothing? A proper dedicated model would be 1000 times better but someone would have to remodel at least the whole underside and rear suspension of the car from scratch to make a fuel tank fit with the proper shape.


Edit: Also added Pigeon race tires and with them it behaves like the old version of the mod lol

 

I've already seen it, the only thing it helps with is that I can see how the worn out engine mounts behave, it looks like a wobbly collapsed spring, which makes sense because it is one

 

Yeah as soon as 0.23 came out, all Pigeon wheels are also available

 

Finally some progress. I have redone the transmission so it's accurate to the image posted earlier, used a resized Autobello transmission model (that I already had in the transmission of the F2 engine), attached the transmission mounts additionally to the nodes shared by both the engine and transmission for more rigidity, and finally I could make engine mounts that behave like a spring. Worn out beater version included that behaves similarly to the one in the video posted in the thread, the engine moves around from just starting and revving with it and it's a lot less stable when driving lol.

Now I have to take care of other not very stable things in the Jbeam, such as plastic FL/EL parts and stuff.
--- Post updated ---
There was a lot less to fix than I thought, the new engine mounts reduce wobbles that were previously causing structural stress on the rear bar, which was affecting the old decklid that had wrong weight. Now the issue is fixed with the new mounts. There were still issues with tow hitch, all plastic bumpers, widebody, tilting windows and leaf spring, but I fixed it all already. Now testing random weird combinations of parts to see if any of them cause issues. As you can see this one doesn't have any excessive forces or stress.

Some more testing and then I'll add interior.

 

Started the interior. For now I have animated pedals (kinda hard to see with these colors):

And animated parking brake:

Shifter won't be animated because I have no idea how and vanilla cars don't have animated manual shifters either. I added all 3 versions + optional TAN gear knob for each of them:

And also interior mirrors:

So basically all stuff the mod had previously, but with animated stuff, and you can swap each part separately for more customization. Tomorrow I'll make the dashboard.

 

I have no idea what this means, it behaves like the Autobello parking brake because I based it on that (no I didn't just "copy the code" or something, it was way harder than that, required changing a lot of stuff in Blender)