Help with colored texture sharing over two identical parts?

[Stone Blue]

Ok, wondering if the following is possible, and if so, how to do it...

So I have two parts... Identical models and textures... EXCEPT for color-coded stripes/decals to differentiate each parts' in-game resource storage.

Right now, both identical parts, have the same 1MB textures/UV maps, EXCEPT for thin colored stripes across a couple of faces... Is there a way to share a single texture between them, and only overlay the different colors on the stripes?

I've looked thru several mods that have parts separated this way, but they all duplicate the full textures... So I wont be surprised if someone tells me what I want is not possible... However, it just seems like you should be able to make a layer for each color, inside a single texture; or at least export the layer for just the "decal" externally, and be able to throw it back on top of the shared texture somehow...???

 

[NecroBones]

 

Yep, totally doable. I do an enormous amount of texture sharing with my parts. If you make two separate MUs for the two parts, with only the UV mapping being slightly different between them, this is real easy. Make sure they use the same material name, and in Unity they will then both get the same texture name when you add the texture. You can then put both parts in the same folder to let them use the same texture there.

 

There are other tricks for putting them in separate folders and still sharing the texture. But the easiest is just to throw them in the same folder. For examples of mine, you can look at Fuel Tanks Plus and Real Scale Boosters, and SpaceY.

 

[Stone Blue]

@NecroBones Huh... I must not have been looking hard enough, because, incidentally, I DID look thru Fuel Tanks + and  MRS, before posting this...lol

I think its because I also wanted to share the same model, between parts, as well as a base texture....
However, I've run into other bigger issues with the models... They're someone else's models, and the object hierarchy seems to be kind of a mess, with duplicate objects, colliders, animations & materials... lol

I have a couple ideas to deal with that, but if those dont work, I may be in over my head on these specific models...
I guess this is the downside of trying to learn by reverse engineering someone else's work...lol

Edited May 29, 2016 by Stone Blue

[nli2work]

you can use separate mesh objects in the part that pull from different textures. pinstripes for example can be separate mesh objects that use a small tiled texture while rest of the model use a larger texture. 

There's also _MainColor property in most KSP materials you can leverage for color variations on identical textures; and RimColor/Falloff properties can be used as self-Illumination as it's not affected by lighting. These do require separate MU exports since material properties are embedded.