fusioncore

You could chop it up into pieces but that wouldn't change much. Does it have infinite fuel or fuel tanks? Either way, it's cheaty or imbalanced or you break the look of the ship by having an enterprise with a bunch of fuel tanks strapped to it. Gallivanting around the galaxy in the enterprise would get pretty old pretty quick if all the gameplay mechanics are removed. But one could kerbalize it a little to be modular I suppose....

Details are good, especially if you're going to be texturing it. Otherwise, you get very smooth detail-less surfaces like pictured above. I could infer a lot of details and just come up with something, but honestly, due to the nature of cockpits and the sheer number of them out there, one really does have to have a planned design scheme to know what they want out of it. It's also important to keep from doing things that might sound good on paper, but be completely useless in practical use. For example.....traversing space. Will the kerbals actually be traversing around inside of the cockpit area, or will it just be a cosmetic feature that makes it seem like they could if they wanted, but don't actually do it? Another aspect is limited space....we're talking a 1.25m to 0.6m node. That doesn't give a lot of room to even give the illusion of traversing space, like getting out of a seat and heading to the back of the cockpit. I do get what you're saying though, you want something more like a bomber cockpit rather than a fighter cockpit.... i.e. something like this: or this: or this: rather than something like this: And from what it sounds like, the third image example is most like what you were describing. I am interested in knowing more about what is broken with wheels or what might be changing about them, wheels have pretty much been the same for years in KSP. While I agree that certain details can be made with textures, one doesn't necessarily have to kerbalize everything or give every single edge of a model an 'edge wear' effect. Here is an example of just minimal textures slapped on it, with a little uneveness to give more than just a solid color. While the hubcap area could probably use a little bit of some edge wear, the teeth of the wheel don't really need all of that, it has a dark texture slapped on to it (not hand painted)....but it's not solid black, there are some random lighter areas. One doesn't have to texture everything right down to every edge and pixel. Funny thing too, it would actually take longer to texture these teeth and apply them to the surface, than it does to make them out of geometry and slap a randomized uneven texture on them. While they do add quite a bit of geometry to the model, I'd say there would only be 4-6 instances of a wheel at a time anyways for the most part, meaning they may be a little more demanding, but lower instances of them keep it from being an issue while adding a lot visually. This model can actually be reduced quite a bit since the inner faces between parts of the wheel are all still there, but those can also be removed. Still, even with them, the model poly's are still well within reason. I've seen a lot of people use several thousand polys or more as a base line for making even relatively simple purpose and static models. Sometimes efficiency itself is one of the biggest time takers. Some models I've spent more time trying to model them for low polys while looking good or achieving what I want, when instead I could of saved hours by not giving a care about the extra poly's, made even more futile by the fact that saving those polys might not make a lick of difference in the long run. I've also definitely seen worse fully textured wheels.

The problem with these types of mods in general is they aren't modular. That pretty much then means a cheaty ship is required. Then when KSP is updated and breaks the mods, it must be updated to keep it working. That's ultimately why mods like these fail. There has definitely been at least a dozen star trek ship mods over the years. There's always someone that comes along with a ship model they've found on a website, wanting to put it into the game. But it's really not such a great idea. I mean we could copy the entirety of scifi ships from googles sketchup 3D warehouse.....but that wouldn't exactly make for good mods. KSP is a modular game with parts. pre made star trek models don't follow the core elements of the game. At the point you run a cheaty ship, you might as well turn your ships engines off and use teleport mods to get from one planet to the next, which kills more of the gameplay. Then at that point, you might as well not even be using a ship to teleport in, but rather teleport on foot. It just gets more lifeless as you think about it. Takes all the gameplay away and turns KSP into a walking simulator.

To me, stock alike parts are basically low-medium poly parts, with most of the details in blurry textures of varying degree's of gray palette, with some noise designed to keep from looking like a single solid color, and a lot of 'edge wear' along edges, which is essentially just a lighter color than the main color of the body. You can do a lot of details in textures and that can be good enough, but I like the idea of fine details made out of models rather than textures. Certain things are more practical than others....depending on how many instances there will be of a given part. Obviously you want a part where there might be 20 of them to not be ultra details, but for parts that might only be used once or a couple times across a ship build, it's ok to give it some extra model detail. It does make it a little hard though, because soo many mods follow low poly that when you mix them, they can look odd side by side. That's partially why stock alike became soo popular, it was easy for a lot of low poly mods to mesh together. The truth is though, low poly with good texturing is going to look better than high poly with bad texturing. But a high poly model with even just minimal texturing, can look better than a low poly model with good texturing. But KSP does sort of need a better shadow pass lighting to make edges of models more defined and visible, that would make edge wear a little less relevant. Another problem with high poly is aliasing, if your resolution isn't high enough you end up with tons of lost details that show up as a bunch of sharp dots and lines. So details are lost there that wouldn't be lost if it was just a texture rather than actual features. It's a bit of a balancing act.....at some distance, all things will exhibit these aliasing issues, even low poly ones. So that's something to take into account to consider how high poly something should be.....based on how close it will typically be viewed from. For example, a wheel could be quite a bit more high poly than a fuel tank needs to be, because wheels are a larger part of vehicles design than a fuel tank is. You have to zoom out quite a bit to see a whole large space craft of potentially dozens of fuel tanks, while a vehicle will only have 4 wheel or so on average. But that also depends on the size of the vehicle. A small rover is typically going to be viewed from further away than a large one, mostly because of terrain features. Another thing to consider is not just how things look standing still, but rather, in motion. An all texture object might look great as a static image, but pan around it and it doesn't interact with light quite like true modelled details do. Bump maps help, but they can only do soo much. But a lot of people also don't do edge wear like it's intended. When edgewear is literally a separate texture/model, it can be much more visually appealing. If you for example, make the body of a model a flat matte texture setting, while making the edge wear a reflective shiny texture setting in unity, the edge wear will actually give off a nice sheen like what you would expect from something that has been worn smooth or where paint has been worn away to expose metal.....which is kind of what edge wear effects are supposed to be conveying. Most however, don't do this, because well, it's a lot simpler to simply cover the border of a texture in a lighter color and call it a day. So even though edge wear is nice, KSP modders typically aren't even using it to its full potential.

So I'm still not really sure where to start with contributing to you, because lack of direction (just saying to make a cockpit in X dimensions isn't much to go on, and that's compounded by the fact that as far as I can tell, it's a redundant task with the plethora of cockpits available following those parameters). I'm thinking maybe I might just need to go by an "if you build it, they will come" approach. So I might just create a thread to upload models I create randomly, and let people grab them and do what they want with them. To showcase a new piece I made, it's a mock up of a rover wheel from a Syd Mead artwork. A pretty accurate one at that, but with a few details of my own. Here is an obj copy of this model for anyone that wants it. Obviously, it's not as high poly as what is displayed here, but adequate for in-game usage. The parts have been separated into colored sections in an attempt to make UV mapping easier, and to make the wheel itself animated if desired. OBJ file: http://www.filedropper.com/wheel

make sure that models you want to make into mods are of your own creation or free for general use.

depending on the modelling program you're using, this can be as simple as thickening lines, rather than slicing models or bevel tricks. example:

While I can understand much of that, there are a few areas that need clarification --Interior traversing space? As far as I'm aware, the function of having a kerbal leave a craft is just a matter of where you want them to appear when they exit. --As for interior creation itself, I think that interiors have to be a completely separate model that are just in the same shape as the cockpit? One thing I will note though, is that there are plenty of mods that already exist that are both inline and are 1.25m to 0.625m, so unless there is a specific cross-part theme design in mind, it seems kind of redundant. Here's an example of what I threw together quickly, so don't be thrown off if it seems too simplistic: Here's something a little more advanced though, to kind of give you an idea of my capabilities:

Doesn't seem like a good fit. As you can see by the guys post, he seems to have no 3D skills whatsoever, so even if I made models for him, I don't think he would be able to do anything with them. Seems more like he's looking for someone to do every step of the work from beginning to end. And when it comes to KSP, we all know that there's plenty of idea people looking for someone to do all the work for them. That however, is not what I'm looking for. As I said in my post, I'm not texturing or importing the models into unity, nor creating the config parameters of the part. I'm trying to offload part of the work of making mods for whoever might need it, with the main benefit being that my modelling skills are pretty advanced. So the primary people I'm trying to help are people who already have an established team, or who are already experienced at modelling, texturing and unity, but want to offload some of the work. While I do have the necessary skills to texture and import models through unity, I don't really have to time to do all of that and only really prefer to model, and since I don't keep up with unity, I'm sure that someone else would be able to accomplish that task quicker with less issues. So it's all about workflow. Find someone that focuses on texturing skills, another that focuses on unity, and that kind of focused workflow can allow people to churn out quality things at a fairly fast pace.

I do high quality efficient work, from high poly to low poly. Strictly offering only raw models, it will be your job to do the rest of the work (texturing, running through unity, configs, etc). Can work from design ideas, or come up with my own based on the function of the part. I'm not here to make complete mods from scratch for people with no 3D experience and just an idea, I don't have the time to do all of that. I am primarily here to help offset some work load to those with the experience and ability to make mods. Serious requests only.