Starwhip

Since I've already got a thread for showing mine off, I'll show off a little bit of the process I used to make my last, which you can find here: You may be wondering how I did the shiny dish on the satellite. A few months ago I was poking around in the node tree on the part shaders, and found a node that plugged into the part's glossy material output. Setting that node to small numbers, such as the dish's 0.01, makes the related part very reflective. It's great for metallic-looking parts. In the second picture you can see the initial state of the render. In Blender I used a spotlight to give me a reference for the smoke and fire on the ground, which is what that blue circle is on the surface. I then drew in the flame, using a transparent light-blue brush to achieve the initial shape, and then filling in more and more towards the center while also changing the color slightly to give the plume its cone shape. A few touches down at the bottom give the plume its final appearance. And in the last image I used a large, jagged brush with a grey transparent color to add in smoke, coloring several passes to make it look like varying thicknesses. Lots of simple steps to make one more complicated image. That's the way I operate when I do my renders.

Oh wow! I absolutely love these things! Really nice work, great style.

This unmanned probe sets down on the Munar highlands, kicking up dust with its main engine as it transmits telemetry back to Kerbin. If you like the craft you can get it here: Mun Lander by @KerbalOmmex I've gotta say, I really love this one. I think that's my best hand-drawn fire/dust effect to date.

Aaaactually, there's a code error in the KSPBlender addon, which I haven't actually checked if it's fixed in the actual plugin yet. But! This was how to fix it on your side.

Okay... I'm still alive, folks. I know I've been AWOL for... wow, a month and a half? It was a bit lot longer than I anticipated, and I apologize. I really lost my art touch for a while. It's a lot like having writers' block, except for rendering. On top of that I had fallen off of KSP again, in favor of a bunch of other games, but as usual I've found my way back. I think that this time, for real, I can at least finish the requests I've got in queue. The other issue had been school wrapping up, but that's been done for a good while now. Immediately after it ended, though, as usual I was up to Michigan to visit family and the internet is a sparse thing there. On top of that I've been working on fixing some stuff around the house. Pro tip: make absolutely certain that the fence post you are trying to re-post has no foundation. It isn't fun to drive a stake down and realize it's embedded in a few cubic feet of concrete. The first render I'll be working on again is @KerbalOmmex's. Then I hope to finish @DMSP's Sahara booster, as he's been waiting for a while, but we may have our first case of my computer not being strong enough for a render with that one, which would be unfortunate. @spacebrick3 your render would be up after that one, but I would need to get a Laythe model working, so it may take a while. Anyways, here is a progress pic of my Munscape, which I'll be using for the first render, perhaps as some proof that I'm back. I took the old one I had, dusted it off a bit, changed the strengths of some modifiers and gave it a new material and a displace node. Now is stands out just a bit more.

Wow, sorry guys. I've been doing waaaaay too many things lately. I think I've cut down enough to pop back here for a while. I have not made any progress since I last got back to you, but I know how to fix the problem I was having before. There really isn't a scale up time based on part count. It depends mainly on the whole scene complexity: What's shiny, what glows, what has volume distortion, what has bump maps, all sorts of background things. It also is highly variable when you change the render quality. A 100x100 pixel render with 10 samples per pixel takes a lot less time than a 1080x1920 one with 300 samples per pixel, as I normally render these. But two renders with the same quality settings of a craft with five parts and Zeke's old 1000+ part shuttle really don't have different render times. (I speak from experience there) Laythe, eh? Hmm. I'll play with that. I don't have a Laythe ready for Blender yet, though I don't suspect it would be too hard.

I would have to say no. Hardly ever is it a good idea to change an aspect of a game (especially a single-player sandbox game where there is no "cheating") when there's a large amount of disapproval for said change, especially when the people who feel it needs to be changed have been given the (very easy to use) tools to do so themselves. Really. The devs have gone out of their way to make this game easy to modify to a player's own liking.

Lovely render! I like the ion trail especially. The sun bugs me a little though. Lens flare in Blender is a tricky beast, which is why I usually do that in another program.

Looking at your diagram there, it seems you're going to need to solve it in a two-step math problem. Problem 1: Getting the top of the navball pointing in the right direction, and 2; getting the rotation of the ball correct. I'm going to load up the game and stare at the actual navball for a while, and see how it reacts to combinations of pitch/roll/yaw.

Bit of a side question here, relating to this. We could beat the "it's your story" horse to death on these questions, but I'm not here for that. I find that I'm one of very few (Perhaps the only one) who has not given Wernher an accent. While I'm not going to change it now, for sure, I wonder what other folks think of it. Is it overly detracting, or simply odd? Would you have noticed it had I not pointed it out? And something else. What say you of his command of the Space Program?

Nope. (What is the sequencer, by the way? :/ I've heard of it but never used it) The flames are modeled. The outer cone is as you see here, and the inner "balls" are simply an emission shader plugged into the Volume output node. I loosely based it off the afterburner flames you can see here:

@selfish_meme's (really really cool) SR-71 Blackbird soars low, afterburners on full!

First post? Hmm. *Forum finagling ensues* Looks like it was this one:

Believe it or not, all my work is done on one of these. I really need an upgrade. :/ EDIT: Yes, that model, and unfortunately that OS too.

@GaiidenAs you can see, my render times are significantly higher than yours. (This is with a new, lower-CPU-intensive atmosphere setup.)

What sample quality? Well, I also go for something that just looks reasonable. It is art, after all! I need a better atmospheric setup first. I do not have the Mun complete either, though I have a good idea as to how I'd do it.

Yes. In theory you could scale the planets up, but that changes the volumetrics for the atmosphere. You have to get the camera pretty close though. If I'm not mistaken, the .blend for Duna in the OP contains Ike as well, in about the right orbit and size.

Is that 9 minutes 41 seconds or 9 hours 41 minutes? I'm closer to the latter.

So I'm starting to get my free time back. Got back into the Blender groove with some StarMade renders, which were a ton of fun. I'm going to be working on @DMSP's request, as well as some background projects which I've been contacted about. Hope to have them done soon!

These are quite nice! And hand-made too, very impressive.

Well shoot. Where were we? I kinda forgot what I had originally intended for this, so we'll find out where it goes together! Chapter Six: Seeing Stars Jebediah frowned as he noticed that he seemed to be slowing down as he approached the rung. He looked about on his suit, but there were no signs that a thruster had malfunctioned. No fuel drainage, no stuck joysticks, nothing. He slowed further, faster, until the rung seemed to stop. And then he began to drift backwards. But he wasn't the one drifting. As the rung pulled away from him, it began to arc upwards. Baffled, he realized to late what it meant. The cockpit of the rotating Venturer I collided with Jeb's helmet with a CLANG, and sent him spinning away from the ship, dazed, Kerbin's blue disk floating into and out of view again and again in the black emptiness. Jeb regained control a few seconds later, stabilizing himself. With a quick flick of his wrist, he spun around to face the ship, which was coming to a stop again, its singular solar panel facing the sun. "What in the world was THAT, Gene?! Gene? Oh. Right." Deftly he pushed the translation stick forward, moving in towards the rung again. He waited a good minute a few meters away, making sure that the ship wouldn't lash out at him again, and then grabbed hold. The antenna was to his right, and he could see the transmitter unit floating free on a short lead of cable. It did not appear to have severed, only broken off. Not focusing the signal properly. Alright. I can fix that. He grabbed the hanging transmitter. Probably. "Whatever it was doing, it completed." Gene rolled his chair back from the desk slightly. "Had we more telemetry we could get the program number, but until Jeb fixes that-" "Hello hello, Control, come in Control?" Gene froze mid-sentence as the transmission fed through. He traded stares with Bill and Wernher, before scooting the chair back in and attempting to transmit. "Jeb? What's happened?" "Well, something blew up, and damaged the antenna. And then the ship tried to punt me to who knows where. I fixed the antenna, sort of. It just snapped off the transmitter circuit, so... I'm pointing it back at the dish." Gene burst out in relieved laughter. "Well, whatever works! There should be a welding tool in the service compartment. Check in there." "I'll have to let go of the transmitter to do that. Anything else beforehand?" Looking at Wernher, Gene asked wordlessly about the autopilot. The scientist shook his head. Gene transmitted again. "Not now. Fix her up, then." He heard Jebediah confirm before the link went dead again.

Oh god, this. You're in for a lot of this. XD "Quick, jump out! It's gonna crash!" *eva, kerbal pops* *everything explodes except the capsule, which bounces and then stops*

I've done this a few times, back in the 0.18.3 demo version. I played the demo until I could consistently land on the Mun, and I even managed to rendezvous two craft in Mun orbit and transfer crew between them. But in the beginning it was all trial by fire, in the most literal sense. I just could not seem to get to orbit! I kept building larger and larger monstrosities: Big radial rockets with asparagus staging (because I had read that was good) and huge amounts of delta-v (Though I didn't know what that was at the time) that would barely scrape above the atmosphere. Little did I know that my problem was gravity turns until I had gotten the full game. (I made it to the Mun and back by going straight up and then doing a 90-degree turn to burn for Kerbin orbit... I haven't managed to replicate that maneuver since. ) So now when I go back I wonder where all the difficulty went. And... it's kind of disappointing, really. What's new to fail at, when you have failed it all? That's why I like the full game so much better. I manage to find something that it seems I just can't do, and headbang until it flies like a dream. I have yet to go to Moho, Dres, or Eeloo, and I've not visited all the moons of Jool, and though that challenge calls me I find the time involved in lining up the transfer windows a put-off. Someday I'll get bored by Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus, maybe, and I'll try to go out there again. Oh! Speaking of Kerbin, and the 1.1 wheel overhaul, I should keep my Elcano challenge run going.

Don't give up, there's not nothing out there.

I was watching the livecast and then remembered where I lived. So I ran outside and presto, there it was. I actually saw the stage separation and the first stage falling behind on the landing attempt. Cooler than the Space Shuttle! Hope the barge landing went well.