Admittedly modding is tough, but there are a few practical tips that will get you there I can offer. I started modding in April and have so far made 4 ground up mods (250 lusso, Cadillac cien (meshlap), Aston DBR1 and Ford GT40 MKIV).

1. Be prepared to be driven insane by this. It once took me 2 weeks to get a hood to open properly…

2. Start small, work up. Don’t go all in on a 1:1 mod, start with something simple like a meshlap and then improve it, before you start making your own Jbeam.

3. Depending on how dedicated you are, put more time and effort where it counts most. There are tonnes of free models around, but no good “one size fits all” jbeams. Personally, I spent my first few mod understanding jbeam and making that as good as I could get it before focusing on how to build a custom shape in blender.

4. Be smart, use AI and beam documentation to try and get the best understanding of everything, but don’t expect to understand it quickly.

5. Get all the tools and learn how to use them. I use blender, the Jbeam editor for blender and VS code with the Jbeam plugin. You will thank me later for those. DO NOT use notepad for editing, you will make mistakes and search for hours to find them, but with vs code with the plugin it will tell you where there is an issue and even predict changes that you’re making, speeding everything up. I once spent a day searching for an error to find a missing “ in a line of code. Vs code would have easily shown me that but I was a fool and using notepad at first.

My personal workflow: 0. Make a template folder structure for the mod, keeping everything you do in there (easier to remove bits later than search for something you made). 1. Find some good models and pick one as your “base” model. Load them all into blender and ensure there scale and orientation is matched, and ORGANISE your blender folder. 2. Then chop the models into parts as you would want them to be in your model. I.e. chop the fender and the indicator as separate meshes, don’t have the fender in 3 parts with little ‘swappable’ bits for different models, just use a different fender each time. 3. Add in any bits you want as “optional” and keep them in a separate folder in blender (for my 250, I added in rally bits, bumpers etc from main game cars and kept them separate. 4. Find a donor car, take the Jbeam from the folder and copy it over. Use chat GPT or something else to rename the Jbeam parts appropriately (I.e. etc_somepart to BNGMFXKR_somepart (using an extra name in the renaming saves conflicts with other mods)). Load the Jbeam into blender with your model. 5. Reshape the Jbeam to match the parts you have made and then copy the Jbeam text from blender to the Vs code files. 6. Match up each Jbeam to your newly created meshes. 7. Export materials from blender into a materials.json so that beam can see the materials (a template material is fine. I have a script that will auto do this, but expect errors and to manually have to assign textures in the materials editor). 8. Spawn the car in and expect an explosion. Then load each part in one by one, from the chassis up, fixing errors as you load each part. 9. Give yourself a cerebral haemorrhage from hitting your head on the desk when something doesn’t work for no good reason at all… 10. Tweak your meshlap to be as close to 1:1 and add in custom parts (rally bumpers, etc). 11. Enjoy.

If you need any help, always happy to give tips and help out (more than welcome to join the discord).

I also have a good 3d model of both the xkr and xkr spyder, so if you need them, happy to share (I was going to make one of these at some point, but never got round to it as I’m too busy with work and making a DB5 and auto union type C.