liquidhype

In terms of setting up the gimbal (and the engine in general), you could not have chosen a more complex engine to be your first engine for KSP. At least if you are aiming for a realistic looking gimbal. Each combustion chamber and nozzle needs to have a 45 degree freedom of rotaton offset from each other. You do this by making each nozzle/combustion chamber the child of a Gimbal Transform in Unity. Then you need to rig the gimbal units and gimbal acutators by using aimConstraints in order for them to function properly. Lastly you need use a skinned mesh renderer on each individual hot gas duct (the lines coming out of the turbine above the LOX and fuel pumps). If you don't use a skinned mesh renderer, the engine will look weird as the top of the combustion chambers will dislocate from the hot gas ducts. You'll need to give each nozzle a thrustTransform in order for the nozzles to have flames and smoke coming out of them when the engine is running. The hierachy for an RD-170 engine in Unity should look something like this: GameObject Thrust Structure/Engine Gimbal1 Nozzle1 thrustTransform Gimbal2 Nozzle2 thrustTransform Gimbal3 Nozzle3 thrustTransform Gimbal4 Nozzle4 thrusTransform This hierarchy is just the engine without the acutator setup and skinned mesh renderer. If you want functioning gimbal units and acutators, you'll need to make all 4 gimbal units the children of the Thrust Structure/Engine and each set of 2 acutators the children of each nozzle. Then you need to use aimConstraints to have the acutators lookAt their respective gimbal units and vice versa. Or if you are lazy and don't care if it doesn't look realistic, you can just have the nozzles NOT gimbal and instead use the thrustTransforms to gimbal and have the nozzles be static. This doesn't nearly look as cool, but it works. As I said, you chose a rather complex engine to be your first

Fantastic, great find! I've been scratching my head for the last couple of days on these thrusters. I kinda figured backwards firing thrusters wouldn't be the case, but I could not for the life of me figure out which direction of control the thruster(s) had. To me it looked like there were only 4 thrusters, all firing "downwards". Thank you for taking the time to help out.

Allright people, I need your help. I wanted to do an as close to reality Voyager mission as possible in KSP, so I spent most of my christmas break modeling and texturing a Titan IIIE launch vehicle and the Voyager probes. The end-goal is to make a video of the mission and put in on the Youtubes. I've finished the launch vehicle (image furher down), but I've run into a bit of a problem with the Star-37E/Voyager part of my build. From the reference images I see that either the Star-37E or the structure holding the Star-37E/Voyager stack has a hydrazine attitude control system, but what I can't seem to figure out is what type of thruster it is, its thrust, and most importantly, which directions of thrust the ACS system has. Is it only "forward" and "back", is it roll? I can't tell. As there are plenty of smart people on the forum, I figured I'd ask for help here. I'll post links to some of my reference images so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about. Reference image 1 Reference image 2 Reference image 3 Reference image 4 Anyways, here is an image of what I've got so far. There is a Centaur-D-1T inside the fairing, but I've yet to render an image of it.

Well there you go. Now we know.

To be honest with you, I have no clue why using mesh = name.mu does not work when having multiple .mu files in one folder. I'm sure someone who knows why will see this thread and answer it for both of us.

MODEL { model = ModName/Parts/PartFolder/NameOfMUfile } Example: MODEL { model = Liquidhype/Parts/titanIV/hercBooster/herculesSRMU } This is all you need. The .mu file knows which textures it needs. If you want you pull a texture from another folder you can use MODEL{} then the path to where the texture is located.

Oh, fantastic! Thank you for letting me know.

I know RF has not been officially updated to 1.2 yet, but is there a WIP update available? I'm getting withdrawals over here, need some realism in my life

Wow, huge thank you to you and everyone who helped make this happend.

Yes the wise thing to do is always to join as many meshes together as possible. The only time you should ever have multiple meshes in one part is when you are making an engine, solar array or parts which needs to move independent of each other. I never, ever use the part itself as a mesh collider. I always use the most simple low-poly shapes possble if a part needs more than 1 collider. Even if you are making a high-fidelity engine, you can still stick with a simple 12-sided cylinder as your collider. There is no need for separate colliders for each engine nozzle (assuming it has more than one nozzle), and a collider for the engine base, turbo-pump, etc. Keep the colliders as simple and as few as possible. And try to have your parts consists of as few independent meshes as possible. Doing that for all parts will help boost performance, especially if you have a lower-end PC.

They are basically reducing the complexity of the colliders and in some cases reducing the amount of colliders per part. Believe it or not, the collider polycount and the amount of colliders per part has more impact on performance than the complexity/polycount of the actual model itself, as it requires more draw-calls. People have tested this in the past by making 500k-1mill polycount parts and comparing their performance against a part which consists of multiple high-poly colliders and multiple parented meshes. What Squad is doing will not boost the performance significantly, but it will certainly help those with less capable computers.

Of course I did not list SketchUp, why would I? I have used SketchUp to teach beginners what the basics of 3D modeling are, but it has no relevance in this conversation, at all.That is like comparing MS Paint to Photoshop, GIMP or Krita. SketchUp is so insignificant compared to other more advanced 3D-modeling software that I don't even bother putting my experience using it on my CV when applying for a job. That is like applying for a job as a car mechanic and putting "I have seen a tire" on your resume. You are of course entiteled to your opinions regarding this topic, but those opinions are absolutely not shared amongst your peers. So with that said, I will not spend more of my time arguing with someone who clearly has little to no experience in the matter. Comparatively speaking of course *shrug**shrug*

Well, with your lack of experience you don't really have the grounds to say if Blender is hard or not, comparatively speaking. I've got years and years of experience in 3D-modeling and I have had to work with multiple different software depending on what project I was working on at the time. I've used Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender, AutoCAD, Cheetah and a bunch of others, and I can with absolute confidence that Blender is by far the easiest to learn and the most user friendly. Your experience with Blender might have been a difficult one, but relatively speaking Blender is much, much easier than any other 3D-modeling software. That is just a plain and simple fact. Ask any veteran in the industry and they will tell you the same thing. They might have a different favorite software (I myself prefer Maya), but in terms of which program is the easiest to use, 99% of them will say Blender.

*shrug**shrug**shrug**shrug**shrug* Again, if you or anyone else had the least bit of knowledge about Blender, you would know that there is 1 single button you can click on to set the origin of an object, instead of having to hold and press 4 buttons. Literally all you need to do is click the "Set Origin" button and it does the exact same things as holding down 4 buttons. *shrug**shrug**shrug**shrug* You need to remember that there are thousands of commands one can do in Blender, so in order to have shortcuts for most of them, some of the shortcuts needs to be a bit crazy, like you mentioned in you little example there. *shrug**shrug**shrug**shrug* I have never come across a Blender shortcut that conflicts with any of the default Windows keyboard shortcuts. I'm not sure what kind of keyboard setup you've got going on, but I guess all I can do is *shrug**shrug**shrug**shrug**shrug**shrug* Just because you don't know how to do something, does not mean it is difficult to do. It simply means you don't know how to do it.

Most of what you need to know about modding KSP can be found on this thread. Granted some of the things on the thread are kind of outdated, but it will definitely give you a good idea of how to go about modding. I recommend watching a couple of the tutorial videos on how to get a model from Blender to Unity to the game. If you are curious about a specific thing, such as "how to engine" or "how to solar panel", check the respective sections on those for images, cfg examples and so on. If there are ever something you can't find the answer to you can always DM a veteran modder or post a question in the addon-dev section of the forum.

Well then those people are not "advanced users" as it literally only requires you to click 2 buttons to accomplish, and that feature has been a part of Blender for many many years. It is as basic as clicking an object and rotating it.

Set your units to "metric" open your properties panel by pressing "N" and scaling the entire model until it is exactly 2.5m along the Z-axis and then apply the scale by pressing "Ctrl+A". It is unreasonably easy and should be one of the first things you learn how to do when learning Blender.

Relatively speaking of course. It is a heck of a lot easier to learn Blender than most other 3D-modeling software. It took me less than a month to go from knowing absolutely nothing about 3D-modeling, to learning how to make complex animations and realistic high-fidelity models. If someone as technologically challenged as me can do that, then Blender is in fact very easy to learn.

Why use FStextureswitch through IFS instead of just FS by itself? Second, why add the texture switching module through a MM file when you can just plop it into the parts .cfg file? Lastly, if you have multiple sized parts using the same exact model and texture, why not just have 1 part have add a TweakScale module to it (seeing as you already gave the part(s) a FStextureswitch module)? Anyways, here is what a FStextureswitch module should look like when not added through MM: MODULE { moduleID = 0 name = FStextureSwitch2 textureRootFolder = Liquidhype/Parts/delta2/gem46al/ textureNames = gem46TEX;gem46TEX7;gem46TEX8;gem46TEX9 objectNames = gem46al textureDisplayNames = blank;7;8;9 nextButtonText = Next Texture prevButtonText = Previous Texture switchableInFlight = false } Make sure to add a "/" at the end of textureRootFolder like seen in my example and make sure to have the other textures placed inside of the folder you are referring to with the textureRootFolder line.

If you want to completely re-texture a part entirely from scratch I would not bother with the current texture(s). What you should do is import the model(s) you want to re-texture into Blender, split the scene and set the viewport to "UV/Image Editor", click on the part, go into "Edit Mode" and press "A" to highlight the mesh. This will show you the UV-map (texture map/coordinates) of that specific part. Now all you need to do is export the UV-map (click UVs and Export UV Layout), drag and drop it into Photoshop/GIMP and create a new texture which will fit perfectly to that model. I've done it here with the stock Jumbo-64 fuel tank as an example:

You don't need to. Unity does it automatically for you.

That is not a problem, it is a good thing. The standard KSP shaders are absolutely horrid and no serious 3D artist would ever use them to display their work, even if it is to showcase the models as a mod for the game. Unless the images of the parts you see on this forum are screenshotted directly from the game, or from Unity with the KSP shaders applied, all the parts are being showcased with peoples own custom material shaders applied to them. It is a given and obvious that the parts you see in the images plastered in most mod threads on here are not going to look exactly like that in the game. It is not the same as McDonalds or whoever else manipulating their images to make their products look more appealing to their customers. This has never been an issue in the past (as most poeple understand how it is done), so I don't see why you would categorize it as a problem.

They are mostly renders from whatever 3D-modeling software one is using. Some people will spend a lot of time setting up the renders with perfect lighting, custom shaders for their materials and so on (which I like), others just hit a "quick render" button and calls it a day, both OK. It is not hard to do. Apply the textures to your models, make sure they are lit up well, position a camera at a flattering angle and hit "Render". Most 3D-modeling software have an internal render engine, but there are also standalone render engines one can use. It all depends on how "flashy" you want you images to appear. You can always use PS or GIMP on the rendered images if you want to add text or whatever after the fact. But text and so on can of course also easily be added in the 3D-modeling software. There are hundreds of ways to accomplish the same thing.

Did you give it a thrustTransform in Unity? Also seeing your config file for the engine would help.

No, you need to download the partTools from the forum. You can get them here. Just drag and drop the "Editor", "Lib" and "Shaders" folders into your Unity "Assets" folder. Once you are done setting up your part in Unity, you select it, click on "Add Component", "KSP" and then "Part Tools". Once you've done that you'll get the PartTools export window like shown below.