Mazda MX-3 0.3 WIP

I suppose it should have been obvious from looking at the car what the problem with the rear suspension was - the ride height was way too high and the suspension was near what is in reality full droop all the time.

Clearly this is not right​

Lowering that improved handling tremendously. I've also made a few small changes to the model (mostly using my own wheels since the ones I bought aren't centered around their rotation point properly) since the last update but the suspension is the big one with this update.

The rear is probably too low now, but I can just adjust the visual offset without changing anything in the suspension geometry to fix that.

Much better.​

It's been a long time since I've updated, but I've finally made enough progress it feels like it's worth doing.

I bought a model of an MX-3 on CGTrader, and while it has a lot more detail than the one I put together, lots of things just don't seem quite right about it. Some of that is certainly because it's a Euro spec car and has different bumpers and lights, but some things just don't seem to line up. I was, however, able to use the wheels, so it wasn't completely worthless (and I may yet be able to use the body with a bit of stretching and shrinking to make the proportions right).

In addition to the wheels, I now have the beginnings of an interior. There's a crude model of a seat, the black background of a dash, a steering wheel, the steel dash bar, and the two clamps that held my switch panel on. One of them is white for reasons unclear to me; Blender has both assigned to the same material.

On the exterior, I cleaned up many (but not all) of the gaps and added sharper edges in a lot of places. I also updated the lights, so they now have clear lenses over reflectors like actual car lights do.

I slightly modified the suspension setup as well, as the car seems to need a lot of rear camber to feel happy. With -2° rear and -2.5° front camber, it feels reasonably close to my actual car. I believe the engine is either making too little power or the body too much drag, as the high end speeds are just slightly lower than I experienced in the real car (101mph vs 106mph into T5 at Road America) but overall laptimes are faster. Corner speeds don't seem to be any faster so it may just have better low end acceleration. At some point I'm going to check how the acceleration compares to my race videos, and perhaps when the weather gets better I'll do some more road tests to really fine tune it. Getting on a dyno would be nice, but that takes more money than I want to spend on this at the one local tuning shop.

Made the textures a lot better. They're still not great, but they're reasonable.