simple_vehicle.jbeam
First file we are going to adjust, contains engine, transmission and the main body. Skip over the engine and transmission.
First part we are going to touch is the main part
Notice that its marked isAuxiliary. This means, in order to see the part in the ingame part selector, you need to activate the Show auxiliary content box later on in beamNG.
Open up blender, import the vehicle.dae
then the simple_vehicle.jbeam. Import only the main part, simple_traffic_vehicle
At the moment, the blender jbeam tool seems to only be able to export one jbeam object at a time, so to play it save, im also only loading one at a time
Adjust the position of the nodes so that they resemble the new bodyshape. Try to select the same nodes on the left and right side of the car together, to ensure that they stay parallel to eachother. For distance adjustments in left/right, i use the scale tool, since this guarantees that both nodes on the left and right side will stay an equal distance away from the centerline
Select the jbeam object in the scene tree and export it back to the simple_vehicle.jbeam
Keep blender open, open/reload the jbeam file in the text editor. Exchange the names of the meshes in the flexbody section, referencing the mesh names in blender.
If theres multiple options, choose the most standard one. I used a standard variant as a guideline, for example this bland wendover
Personally, i delete every mesh that does not fit the appearance of the standard vehicle in blender, so that i should end up with only the basic option of a part, instead of three different ones. Less clutter and confusion, but you do you.
Many mesh names might already line up, since beamNG is somewhat consistent with naming between vehicles
The meshes are loosely visually grouped into sections, body, engine, dashboard, doors...
Notice that for the glass and lights, you need to change the name just under deformGroup
Load the car in beamNG, and it may look something like this
Check the beamNG console the see which mesh failed to load, and correct/check their names in the jbeam
Once you got all (most) of the parts that are attached to the body itself, we can move on to adjust the suspension positions.
Locate the suspension in the slots section and adjust the nodeOffset on z axis for back/forth and x axis for up/down
Adjust the position of the light sources
baseTranslation z axis for back/forth and x axis for up/down
