Retexturing and repurposing a stock item

[Kokoro]

I was having problems when I was playing Kerbal career with funds.  I had this idea to re-texture a part as a billboard and use it some way to get funds in the game.  I think someone pointed out that the only way to do it would be to assiociate the part with a contract.  I originally envisioned having a billboard on board to generate funds over time.

I havent looked at this in a while, I would like to get it working and release it if possible.  I have no 3D model making skills but have made numerous retextures for flight unlimited 3 and flight simulator (2002 and 2004) in the past and more recently Company of Heroes 2: http://steamcommunity.com/id/kokoro/myworkshopfiles/?appid=231430

 

So this is as far as I got with Kerbal in January 2016.  In the folder in Gamedata I have a cfg, a dds texture and the solar panel .mu file.

Sorry if my questions sound stupid, but I have looked and I don't know where to find the answers.

First, does model.mu need to be in there or is there a way to associate the cfg with the existing solar panel model in the game, so that the model.mu doesnt have to be bundled?

In order to get multiple billboards would subfolders with different cfgs and texture files be needed or what other ways are there?

[steedcrugeon]

There are a couple of ways to attack the multiple billboards, one would be to have individual parts for each or another would be to use a texture switcher, like B9 or FireSpitter or the very tidy PartSwitcher (I believe B9 is the current flavour of the month with regard to that?) they all go about the actual swapping of textures in different ways.

but by using one of those plugin you can have you your part/or parts use the same model but have the advert displayed selected in the VAB.

If you wanted to go down a non-plugin route then you are limited to creating a fresh model and texture for each separate billboard design and size you want. From my current understanding of how KSP works, the .mu file will search for the texture file its mapped to and will use the first one it finds in that folder. so without a plugin if you used one folder with all the textures and the one .mu file you would only ever see one picture on your billboard, irrespective of how many .cfg files there were. However if each part had its own subfolder, for instance:

GameData[folder]
	->YourBillBoardMod[folder]
		->Agency[folder]
		->Parts[folder]
			->Billboard1[folder]
				->billboard1.cfg
				->model.mu
				->texture.dds
			->Billboard2[folder]
				->billboard2.cfg
				->model.mu
				texture.dds

I hope that gets the vague idea across and that's just one way of doing it without plugins.

Although I feel that it probably wouldn't take you long to learn to drive blender and unity than you could build the model you actually want?