Hello there, just had an idea(maybe someone before me had, couldn't find something about it though): so what about blending to another texture depending on the beam stress, like a crumble normalmap to fake some denting details? I'm pretty sure you have the beam stress levels somewhere anyways, so you could feed them to the vertex shader and then to the fragment shader accordingly to blend the normalmap over the undented one, so the more stress the dentier it looks.
With dents you mean something as in SR3? (imported from here) It would be a neat idea, but what if the car just get scratched? Wouldn't the dents be not-relevant to the kind of crash?
a scratch doesn strees a beam that much thus it only lightly blends in if at all. as I said I would connect it to the stress level of the beams, so let's say normal state without dents and without being bend is 0.0 and fully bend is like 1.0, so you have a linear scaling of the normal map.
