How to Make, Present and Drive Cool Cars With Advanced Techniques
Have you ever looked at any of the intricate cars posted here or somewhere like the official discord server and wondered how they’re made? Have you ever wanted your cars to be featured in places like the official social medias, update notes or even the game’s own background screenshots? Have you ever wanted your creations to have a little extra detail & flair when driving them around in BeamNG? This is a guide centered on the design aspects of this game, and my own thought process behind my designs, with additional sections on capturing good photos and exporting your creations effectively. It includes some mention and aspects of the engineering side of things where needed, but to be honest, there are tutorials from people far more knowledgeable about that sort of stuff elsewhere.
Hi! I’m Kaybee. I’ve been playing this game for a few years. I’ve been featured on the official social media before, and I’m friends/had been friends with a lot of the core modding community. I’ve picked up a lot of tips and tricks from a lot of different methods of building and compiled the ones I use the most in this guide. When I started off, I always wished to have someone show me the kind of tips and tricks they knew in order to make these sort of cars–so, hopefully, someone will benefit from this guide and skip all the hard parts to start making the cars of their dreams fast!
I want this document to be a living thing, so instead of letting it sit as a WIP, I’m uploading it to see if I can just outright ask for comments, questions and update ideas as the game and community matures and evolves. Some things may be outdated.
Last edited: 02/03/2025
Step 1: References, Planning & Preparation
Before I start making a car in the game, I have figure out the groundwork for what I want to make. Otherwise, I spend too long scrolling through all the different bodies available and throwing fixtures at bad ideas, and end up wasting my time. I personally enjoy sports cars and motorsport-related things, so these are at the core of what I make and what I’m teaching here, but most of it should reasonably extend to making any other kind of car in the realm that this game allows.
I gather resources from a lot of different places, and make some of my own when I need to. Some websites I like to go to include Motorsport Images and Racing Sports Cars for modern & historic race images, the CarStyling blog for concept cars, the Automobile Catalog for mechanical statistics and similar vehicles, and ArtStation for more concepts and renders.
When I have all my images collected, I put them in a PureRef file so I don’t lose anything if I need to close the game and come back later. In some cases, I’ll even take screenshots of the blank car body I’ve decided to use and draw my ideas directly on top of it; Photoshop and CLIP STUDIO Paint are very handy and powerful for this, but you could even use Microsoft Paint if you have no other alternative.
If I can’t think of any ideas, I like to generate new ideas on my own with things like:
- Playing the “What if…?” game. Think of how any specific car would look like if it were made in another part of the world, or another era. What would a 90’s Chiron look like? Or a modern-day Shelby Cobra? What if McLaren made the NSX, or Honda made the F1/P1? Think hard about the safety and design aspects from each era/manufacturer, and what would need to change versus what needs to be consistent and recognizable.
- Read motoring and automotive news, catch up on motorsports (if applicable), and find videos talking about or showing off cars. See if you can find yourself asking questions like, “What would I do differently here?” and, “How can I break these styling cues apart into shapes to recreate on my own?”
- Go outside and find some cars in your area to recreate. Bonus points if you have the ability and freedom to take reference pictures; you are your own best friend when it comes to figuring out what you can make easily and what you need to study in order to make them authentically.
Step 1.1: Beginner/Advanced Controls
I need to prelude this section with a notice: this guide is being written while the game is in the midst of the Al-Rilma alpha update, and making these is a bit tricky in the first place, so some parts here may be out of date by the time another update arrives. I’ll do my best to keep things up-to-date, but fair warning!
- You can right-click a checklist option to quickly deselect everything but that box, useful for quickly sorting through car bodies. You can also use the right mouse button (or ctrl-click on Mac) to scroll lists with dragging. This is just a feature of Unreal Engine itself and not unique to the game.
- As of the current alpha, you can alter the body morphs and place fixtures before starting the engine; however, it’s usually good practice to finish your cars before starting any serious design work, since the tires/wheels and suspension may alter based on what you need the settings to be.
- On the Trim Body tab, you can alter the shape of the car entirely. I like to either have a solid reference or idea ready to go, or scroll through the list as I edit multiple times to see what knock-on effects any change has elsewhere.
- On every tab in the Trim & Aesthetics section, there’s a gear button on the left-hand side of the screen. This allows you to alter many different aesthetic choices of the car, including the wheelbase & ride height, rim & tire properties, engine size and location, and chassis visibility, among others. The settings don’t affect in-game calculations but do translate to BeamNG.Drive exports.
Step 1.2: Car-Building 'Etiquette'
There isn’t really a definite, strict etiquette on how to make cars within the game; you can obviously build cars however you please. But time and time again I see lots of new players make the same handful of design mistakes and faux-pas, especially in forum challenges, and I even committed a few when I was new myself!
- Some car bodies in the game are very old or are ported in with little care, and are much more rigid when it comes to cutting away some parts of the body or using different morphs. Try to avoid using them unless you absolutely have to.
- If you’re trying to make realistic cars, especially retro/vintage/antique ones, learn the basics of license plate laws, sealed beam laws and the kinds of standards needed for road-worthiness in the country you need. You shouldn’t have to resize the standard license plate & sealed beam fixtures, since they all already correlate with the legal sizes for their specific jurisdictions.
- If you’re playing on Windows, you have access to a wonderful assortment of Steam Workshop mods that are highly versatile, important, and even essential to some things mentioned here… but at the same time, probably overwhelming to use for new players! I’ll be linking the mods that I mention as they come up, but if you have the disk space and patience, it’s recommended to simply download Delta’s Collection and not have to worry about picking & choosing what you need.
Step 2: Fixture Usage: Patchwork, Cutouts & Moldings
If you’re new to the game, you may be confused about how some players are able to drastically alter the bodywork of some cars in the game to an unrecognizable degree. But once you come to understand the essential parts that make up these styles and designs, you can break them apart in your mind and understand how to replicate, modify & improvise them for your own work.
If you look at the example above, you’ll notice that I was able to (mostly) taper the bodywork from the front wheel fenders all the way to the intake vents at the rear. This is a simple application of two fixtures: a cutout patch (invisible) and an angled patch (selected, outlined in green).
The cutout patch is colored here for visibility, and it’s exactly what the name implies; a patch applied to the body that’s made invisible with a transparent material applied. The angled patch is then fit in the correct place so that it covers the entire area of the open spot. Sometimes, one patch isn’t enough, so you’ll need to continue shaping your cutouts with more body molding parts. This concept, of cutting away and layering fixtures into & on the car’s body, is the foundation for how I and a lot of other designers actually make our works. Playing around and experimenting with these parts is the key to figuring out your own ‘style’, which I’ll talk about in-depth later.
These two body molding groups are some of the most important and commonly-used in my own creations:
- Default, Angled & Decal Patchwork. Cutout patches are essential to using some other fixtures and mods, body-colored grills and angled patches can be used to manually shape the parts that are cut away, and decals/normal patches are good at filling in holes or for 3D fixture placement of planes. Some must-have mods for more patchwork versatility are Patchwork Plus, Gizmo’s Body Shaping and Cutout mods, the RB Seam Kit and Xian’s Molding Packs #1 & #2
- Additive Body Panels and Molding Pieces. This includes the ‘Holy Molding’ fixture mentioned in Kanye’s tutorial. Each part has a few variants, and they’re all useful in both conforming & 3D builds. The Al-Rilma update has introduced a new subsection of pieces that allow you to place down vents that are found on a lot of modern cars quickly. There are also some versatile additive pieces in the bumper bars, scoops, 3D and miscellaneous fixture categories.
Using this knowledge as a basis for further explanations, let’s take a look at how some other applications of these tools can provide virtually endless possibilities when it comes to details and shape.
Beginner Example 1: Mixing & Layering Additive Molding
In this example on a mid-2010s BMW-inspired sports car, I’ve mixed together a fixture that cuts the body out, the D-shaped body molding piece, with a molding fixture that lays on top of the body. These are both on the same layer, 2 of 4, as shown in the bottom left. Note the diffuser is cutting away from both of these as well, because I’ve assigned that piece to a higher layer than the first two.
If you wanted to look closer at the details, you will notice that this section looks hollowed-out, exposing the fact that this piece is being cut away from the layering method. But…
With some planning and consideration for the bigger picture, you can see that this detail gets lost on the scale that most pictures are taken, and the effect looks almost seamless even when directly observed.
Advanced Example 1: 'Blending' 3D fixtures into the body contours
Shadow’s Roof Fixture Pack is a powerful mod to mix & match different kinds of body shapes with different roof structures, albeit trading the ability to conform fixtures to the roof & cut sections away. But It’s still helpful in this example, involving a mid-2000s Italian-flavored supercar. With this, my goal was to contrast the squared-off bodywork of the Y2K Prototype mod with something sleek and aerodynamic to give the appearance of a street-car-turned-GT1.
I started with setting the paint swatches on the car’s roof, trunk & windows transparent, then adding these single-axis patches to ignore the conforming area of the front glass section. These patches work best when applied in long strips, lengthwise across (not with) the angled section you’re trying to “ignore”.
If I had taken more care here, I could have cut a new panel line for the door, but I decided against it for time’s sake. Regardless, I want to note that it’s easier to blend these roof sections into flat & concave sections of cars, which this body allows due to its shape across the door wells. Some of the roofs in this section have missing spots near the base of the A-pillars, so take care to use the right molding for the shape
Another set of holy molding fixtures across the rear section ensure the body is flush as I fill the space to the rear of the car.
For car bodies that are more convex, like this 70’s restomod, mid-engined muscle car, there are a few different ways to blend door panel lines and roof shapes to bodies.
With regard to the door seam here, from top to bottom, I have three methods to show: Using separate body moulding pieces in 3D placement to give a defined seam, using RB Seam Kit to place your own seam on the original body work, and using a very thin & transparent patch on a higher layer to cut-out additive molding seams.
Step 2.1: Custom Materials & Textures
When it comes to realism and attention to detail, some of the default materials aren’t ideal for all applications. I usually have a handful of custom materials that I use across most builds, including some from CS Mat Pack, MD’s Custom Paints and CS Canvas. You can also upload your own textures by using the standard ‘Custom Image’ material, and can even make them more detailed with masks and normal maps. There are some limitations (one example, the height and width of images need to be 256, 512, 1024, etc. to export in some cases) but with a little understanding it’s a very handy way to instantly make certain surfaces exactly to your needs.
Step 3: Photography Tips
Photography is hard to come at from a completely beginner’s perspective, but I’ll lay down some fundamentals as they apply to Automation’s photo scene function.
- First and foremost, if you’re putting together a photo scene and like your settings enough to re-use them, you can save the entire scene’s layout in the ‘presets’ tab, then load either the entire scene or just the settings for the camera, car and location.
- Focus distance and aperture work to control where the focus is in a picture. A large aperture results in a picture with a wide field of focus, so backgrounds are sharp. I recommend a smaller aperture if you’re not using HDRI scenes (more on that later) so the focus stays where it needs to–the car.
- Color grading is useful to fine-tune the light levels on pictures, but not strictly required for getting good pictures; compare how professionally-taken pictures IRL look on your monitor and use that as a rough baseline if you have trouble finding out how to master your colors.
- HDRI scenes are akin to the systems for taking pictures of cars in Gran Turismo 4 & 7; if you have a good measure of what your car’s actual size is (thankfully a new feature as of Al Rilma’s 4th patch) and a corresponding way to measure the scale of things in a custom scene, you can authentically replicate the scale in very immersive ways.
- Raytracing is a great way to inject realistic lighting into a scene, but unless your computer is especially powerful, it can be tricky to even use. My method (since I’m just barely able to use high raytracing on my 6600XT video card) is closing all other applications, composing my scene, and only then turning on raytracing before taking a pic.
Posting images to the forums in pleasing ways, like using custom borders and backgrounds and other aesthetic flairs, is an ability that takes effort to learn in & of itself. W3 Schools is a great place to start dissecting the different aspects of posting to forums like this using HTML & CSS skills, and in some circumstances you can even use your browser’s inspect tool to find out how a post was made.
Yeah, just like that! :3c
Step 4: AutoBeam Exporting
I’m not a complete expert when it comes to making the most out of BeamNG.Drive exports, neither in handling performance nor in visual fidelity, but I’ve made a handful of cars that are acceptable from a VR standpoint and from a driving feel perspective. And with that, my tips to newer/inexperienced builders are this:
- The Advanced Trim Description settings are a very experimental & buggy way of implementing moving props in the game, like steering wheels and dash gauges, but they’re incredibly satisfying when you get them working for the first time and usually worth the effort. The AutoBeam Animation Generator is an easy way to make these props, and there’s a tutorial on it’s function in the readme linked above. (Sometimes the wrong fixtures will animate on the first export, for some reason, so make sure to use the free cam and note the fixture’s listing in Automation for adjustments.)
- There are specific functions you can execute on lines in the trim description, including
!ev!to automatically export a car with electric motors and batteries,!race!to export a car equipped with racing tires and a racing transmission, and!police!to export a car with a flag indicating it’s a police car in the BeamNG traffic system. - If you have the patience (and some jbeam & blender modelling know-how), you can even model your own custom suspension setups in the game, for off-roading and open-wheel applications.
- With regards to internal design, it helps to reference as much as you can. The Crash Dummy mod is a good mod to double-check the human proportions of your cars, and if your computer is beefy enough you can run both BeamNG and Automation simultaneously, exporting and refreshing it in-game to edit your car on-the-fly.
Step 5: The Ethos of Good Vehicle Design
This part’s construed from a lot of estimated guesses, but it’s still very subjective. Skip it if you want, but don’t take this as anything more than one person’s opinion if you don’t align with me on it.
“Car design is about the most complicated, creative activity I can think of. Designing a car involves everything from organizing people, marketing, engineering, ergonomics… and from my perspective, most importantly, aesthetics.” --C. Edson Ami, professor of art history at University of California, Santa Barbara.
I believe designing cars can be an art that reveals a lot about the maker. The most well-made cars in this game are thoroughly deliberate, made with great care and are a window into the mind of their makers. Like other art, I believe it is also one that is inherently cultural, social and political–even aside from the obvious glances you can make towards people like Wilhelm Kissel, Henry Ford or Elon Musk, you can’t separate any great car from the culture it was made in, and those cultures greatly influence what is made inside them for the sake of just being there. Sealed beam and license plate laws, crash & safety & environmental regulations, engine displacement taxes, multiple fuel crises and material shortages; these are all little pieces that were shaped by the world as we live in it. And what one decides to focus on and conveniently ignore for the sake of their own artwork tells a lot about what that person might experience in their day-to-day life.
In the real world, modern automobiles are developed hand-in-hand by a small army of designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and artisans. Each and every one of these people have interests that also lie outside the realm of automobiles directly, informing their interests elsewhere and simultaneously drawing inspiration from outside-in as well. Marcello Gandini was born into a family of musicians. Harley Earl was an artist, being one of the first to incorporate rendered sketches and clay modelling as a critical, necessary step of his work techniques. Ken Okuyama has designed award-winning massage chairs and railway trains.
My point being, I believe if you want to design good cars, you have to understand the core concepts of designing in general. And if you want to understand all that, you have to be curious about the world and the things in it. You have to find a balance–your particular balance–of studying what you like and know, studying what you don’t know, and studying what you don’t like. I believe you eventually have to get out of your comfort zone, if you have one, to make good designs, or at least to synthesize the ideas from what you don’t like into something that’s better. Draw from life! Find inspiration in your library, out on your streets, or in your bedroom. Find the cars where they don’t exist; an unusual stain that looks like a coupe’s side profile, or a chair that resembles a grill are both good examples of what I mean.
If you’re designing things that are meant to exist in the last 50 years, it helps to have an understanding of aerodynamics/fluid dynamics, even partially. Finding the content of award-winning aerodynamicists like Dr. Joseph Katz and Kyle Forster have helped me learn what to look for and understand about aero, but you’re not entirely bound to the laws of physics either–it’s a game, and for all intents & purposes good visual styling is usually better than adhering to sheer aerodynamics (unless that’s the goal, but the two still go hand-in-hand even at the extremes).
The best designers in this game are also patient to an unbelievable degree. You kind of have to learn to love the process, at least some of it, if you wanna spend as much time as the most proficient designers I know. But you don’t necessarily need to spend lots of time in-game, either; there’s a certain proficiency that comes from learning how to do things quickly, although that seems to come more often from good planning than anything else.
Finally, once you have played around and experimented enough with all of these tools, you will eventually come across a system or theory on how exactly you can best make your own cars. This is the foundation for your style, but don’t feel shackled to it if you start to get burnt out. You really do have the power to make anything that you set your mind to; always remember that!
And for one last tip, don’t be afraid to ask questions or seek assistance. You still ought to be kind to the other designers playing this game, but they’re usually more than willing to answer anything if it’s asked the right way. I know I really enjoy talking about my design process (it’s the reason I started writing this in the first place!), and I’m certain others do too. Find people making things you like, even if they’re not “quality”, and work together on making each of your cars better. Engage in the community! After a while, it feels like all the pros eventually hit burnout; there’s only so many cars one can make in this world!
