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Bashpr0mpts modeling thread


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Got all of those already; hence how I got the DAE's up and running! :P Thus far I've collected a veritable tome of noob proof directions, so the Unity / getting the PNG working with the mesh part is the only element I'm still missing. Well, that and successfully getting KSP to run ****. But I am assuming that given it's 'the old way' of doing parts that this new method should overcome the random **** ups. The worst part about this is that trying to recreate the failure to pin it down to one thing is proving impossible.

I did find a 'creating a KSP asset' tutorial that was somewhat decent, however again it's sort of in a range that the average punter won't be able to work it. Provided things are kept simple, say, walking them through what I'm currently trying to do, implement a basic shape in the game with a couple of connection points and a graphical skin, they can then dick around making more complex shapes and parts in their own time. But the fundamentals are making the mesh, exporting the faces of the part to a PNG, making the node_collider, assigning material to the mesh and the node_collider, exporting that ****; then this is where you come into it, we take our pretty PNG, and DAE file with two meshes in it, and obey your every instruction! :b

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Ok. Random update. I rebooted my computer. That's code for my cat spewed inside it, she's old, frail, and sick and just got home from the vet so was tripping balls on the methadone they gave her for her pain. I let her sit near the PC because it's warm and gave her comfort. She did me a favor. I cleaned it, and had to turn it off. Flash forward ten gruelling spew cleaning minutes, reloaded the PC, went back into Blender, thought **** it, going to give it one more shot from scratch. Did everything I did before. Opened it in KSP (hadn't even made a skin, cbf'd if it wasn't going to work) and bam, it loaded. I put the empty skin in /textures, as directed too, mind. But yeah, same actions, different results. **** my life. Now I'm going to draw a pretty skin for it and await further instructions from Kerbal Command. Well, Tiberion and Radion. But KC sounds more dramatic. >_>

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Added an awesome skin, deleted the /mesh folder so it'd rerender the part 'the old way', yielded the same result, invisible part. Not even visible nodes this time (even though the node positions I used were the original I used that manifested one singular green large node the first time around). Back to waiting for instructions before proceeding. :'(

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You need Unity and the Part Tools to make a functioning airlock.

I'm not confident enough to try a functioning airlock just yet; so it was a cosmetic piece, a nicely shaped part jutting out from the main geodesic dome resembling an airlock hatch and mounting. However getting my part to load in the game is still my first and only challenge thusfar. My art skills are my strength, along with some awesome ideas for parts that're being overlooked yet essential to our imagination fueled gaming with KSP. But if I can't get my art and ideas into the game, there's no point going too deep into aesthetics and functionality just yet (says me, the idiot who just spent an hour making an awesome skin for his part that then failed to load in game (see previous post), so I'm being hypocritical there! :B).

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Open your COPY png in the image editor with image-> replace image

There is no option to replace image when I've got the image UV map exploded view open. If I open a 'New Image' terminating the old image I can then 'replace image' with a loaded image, but then it ****s up and loads **** funny. But it seems to have worked to that point. Now how do I get it into the game via the 'new' Unity method?

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So, I've again returned to that fault that makes no sense. After having my -invisible- part appear in the game, I spent some time skinning it, brought that skin back into Blender, alt Z'd, exported the DAE, set up the cfg with the texture still in /textures (and defined in the CFG) just in case even though the textures clearly imported back into the DAE (?), then ran KSP and bam, it freezes at hab. Double checked, node_collider mesh and materials are named node_collider, so it should all be working flawlessly. But nope, won't bring it into the game, won't even load the game. The **** am I doing wrong now? Anyone have any ideas?! :'(

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Thanks again to the both of you; this is the last state of my last attempt, prior to reimporting the skin (which had about as much effort in it as thirty clicks of the pain bucket because by this stage I was already considering shooting my computer and myself in frustration) it loaded into the game with no visible connection nodes and an invisible skin (obviously) but the tooltip was there over the blank space. I've changed the position of the part to category 0 subcat 0 because I wanted to minimize the amount of clicks to check if it's there, and figured that'd save a microsecond of time in trouble shooting.

The zip is located at: http://www./?2fcq1m5sz4ht4wu

I look forward to finding out how much of an idiot I am. :b Thank you, again, you guys are life savers. <3

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I'm continuing to model the parts for my hab. I am saving them just as a .blend, I figure if I can't get it working I'll give them away to someone who can. In the interim I've created an oxygenator panel that attaches to the outside of the inflatable dome, it has a teroidal connection point where ideally the next module (the power system) will connect with an invisible mesh with a 'cable' that will ideally line up with the teroidal female plug hole and lead to a base unit which ZO2 / EPS panels can be attached to. I'll set the oxygenator up as a ZO2 base unit so the hab can have 'life support' ideally, and with a unit sitting beside the hab apparently connected by a cable it'll add to the realism.

How I'll stack and use these units for in transit delivery is going to be a problem however. Something I will think about later, just like the expansion animation I'll need if the hab is inflatable. This is the finished oxygenator sans skin so far, I'll worry about drawing pretty skins once I'm secure in the knowledge I won't be spending hours making more pretty things only for them to not work like my last few attempts.

Oxygenator panel mesh: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/SVJQL">http://i.imgur.com/SVJQL</a>

Edit: Whoa, idk why there's so much edge shear in that thing. Bad moment of capture is my guess, the actual finished product is as smooth as a baby's arse while still conserving triscount. But it's enough to get the general jist of the shape.

The science behind it: at extremely low tempretures one can pass highly CO2 contaminated air through a low-insulative quality pipe exposed to the Martian atmosphere, rendering it liquified, the liquid is then blasted against a catalytic plate which breaks the C from the O2 leaving you with high concentration O2. An animation every so often of an air jet coming from the panel would be grand, so I need to remember to try to do that, as the C is expunged and the O2 is reheated.

The O2 can then either be mixed with something readily available, say, left over hydrazine from landing engines, then control combusted to create H20 and straight oxygen, two units that are very handy to have available in an isolated place such as the Duna surface. Bodily fluids can also be processed through an oxygenator in a similar fashion, in fact, I should probably add another atmos loop to that part for weewee to not so icky stuff conversion, as everything has different boiling and freezing points, which makes using the temp outside being REALLY****INGCOLD super handy. The only real cost is heating **** up again, but if you use afforementioned hydrazine reaction the combustion does that job for you, recycling the energy that would otherwise be dispersed and wasted.

Update: Just going to keep on making parts for my hab pack and worry about making them work later. I'm having a bit of trouble projecting the unwrap properly for some of the more complex parts (ie: the hab itself has a rubber inflated landing foot to try and minimize impact and hopefully allow for manned landings of fully integrated habs at later points, it's weird ass spiral unwrap takes up most of the field for the UV unwrap. So I'm hesitant to add a complex skin to it until I've got that sorted, I saw some methods of 'unselecting' parts, but due to it being a torus I can't unselect parts because pretty much every unwrapped part is in some way visible; the overall skin of it is a simple low res rubber compound so it shouldn't be too dramatic if I just resize that part much smaller than the others right?

Also, do any of you folks use Twitter? If so, add me, @bashpr0mpt, to show my appreciations I'll throw you some of my fans to bump your follower numbers and make your e-peens larger. Hit me up and @ message me when you've added me so I have your usernames and can add you back / give you guys a shout out.

Thinking about making a communications platform for the top of the hab to house a few antennae and a dish, I'm thinking of making a nicer variant of the remote tech dish, I've jury-rigged a few different dishes to use instead of the woeful mapsat dish (although the mapsat dish is nicely animated, I'll definitely give it that! But having one design of such an awkward height and size is frustrating!) I'm also considering making the landing foot and building foundation as a separate part, and having it separated from the bottom of the hab by very small trussing just as an extra bit of fluff and detail. Although from a scientific POV you wouldn't want martial air getting under your hab and would want it pressed firmly against the soil to avoid windchill dropping the skin temp.

An RTG, that should be what I make next. I'd love to add a functional air lock to the hab, a crew tunnel to connect habs (if we had docking systems that worked I'd totally try and get it set up so you can connect them on the planet (using that nifty forklift from kerbal.net or by EVA like ORDA's refueling hose), but I'm going to need some serious assistance working out node connection location coordinates. ATM I've just copypasta'd **** for illustrative purposes simply because I'm more interested in getting the part to appear in the game first and foremost. Uh, yeah, RTG's, they're handy. Radioisotopic thermal generators are pretty much free electricity! If I could get it working with the electricity plugin (if only Zoxygene and the Electricity plugin guys got together and made their systems talk to each other, man that would be epic!) it'd naturally attach someplace close to the Oxygenator panel, or perhaps even mount on it. Nah, Kerbal's are suicidal, but you still want radioactive **** a few feet away from your bedroom. >_> Right?

Edited by bashpr0mpt
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Updated the Oxygenator panel model to include a point for the gas jet effect every five minutes or so, and the bodily fluid processing atmos exposure tube.

Image: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Zme4H">http://i.imgur.com/Zme4H</A>

The skin will obviously bring the ****er to life a hell of a lot more than the model ever could. But I added a few minor touches that seemed worth the triscount sacrifice such as screws, each at individual and different angles of each flat head.

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I'm starting to worry I'm commenting in the wrong thread; splitting them up was a bad idea. .__.

I refuse to sleep until I figure this out. :'( I'm just going to add to the model / part pack in the meantime. I have the basics down for an RTG and initial inatmos ion venting ('ion engines') for attitude control. Although because I'm a massive dork I had to read up on all the technology involved with all aforementioned parts and see a few bazillion examples of them before being willing to try to render them. The RTG's are going to prove pretty complex, they're not a short fat black dildo with fins, as most games have led me to believe. Am I missing any parts any one can think of?

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Well, I loaded the part in Blender and it was fine. So I looked at the config; the only issue you had was your nodes. You were telling it to spawn nodes 50 meters from the origin of the part, but its only roughly 1meter tall and 1meter in diameter on the bottom.

Also, if I told you that nodes should be measured from the center of the node_collider I was wrong, it uses the 'main' objects mesh as the center (in this case, your dome, which as its origin basically centered on the bottom face.)

This may in fact be a bug as I am not sure how it would handle a more complex part that has multiple objects (like a winglet for instance)

Anyway, I tweaked the config and it works in game fine:

xOv4K.jpg

Here's the new node configs; its all I changed.

// --- node definitions ---

node_stack_top = 0.0, 1.1, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1

node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.1, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1

node_attach = 0.0, 0.0, 0.6, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0

I didn't tweak them to perfection, I figured you should do that.

Note; you may not need a node attach, it regulates how far KSP 'thinks' the surface of your part/collider is when allowing other parts to surface attach to this one; and with the cylinder collider you are using, its not needed necessarily since the game understands cylinder colliders fairly well, and will allow things to snap to it naturally. You can mess with it and see how it affects things though.

Also, once you get Unity/Partslab under control, you can make a much more effective collider for that by simply cloning the dome mesh and adding a "mesh collider" to it in Unity, and telling it to force CONVEX (since colliders must be convex shapes or they fail physics checks) - it will then make a primitive shape that matches the mesh as close as possible, so you'll have a roughly dome-shaped collider.

Edit: one other thing I didn't explain; See the trailing "1" on both the top and bottom stack, basically a 7th digit? That controls what size of node you generate. 1 is the normal big green nodes, and 0 is tiny pink nodes for smaller parts. Node_attach does not have a 7th digit

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... I just wrote a thirty line post of the letter's F and U. Now that my initial reaction is out the way; are you serious, the entire problem was the stupid nodes I copied from the part I recycled the .CFG from? D:<

Also, I used a clone of the actual shape as a collider, but every tutorial I watched was all herpaderp make a cylinder with 12 sides and ****, so I thought maybe my complex collider was at fault at first and ditched it.

I can't believe that bad node locations hung my game at the habitat on the loading screen? What a ****ty way to make me assume woeful fault on my behalf and try and try again to recreate it. I'm giving it a shot with the node points you've given it. Touch wood it will load, because I've got a bit of a part pack going on now and want to skin them without fear they'll never work. :D

Is there much detriment if I continue using this 'old method' to make model parts? Is there an impact on performance in game? Because I've noticed the game is woeful at memory management and **** grinds to a halt with even mildly complex models, so I want to minimise that where I can. Also; is there a reason blender can never import .dae's of other peoples stuff? It just loads a ****ing cube whenever I try and import or load things. :/ Should I be getting some other program to open .DAE's? I noticed Unity will open them, but when something like zoom is as counter intuitive as alt right click and drag I'm still kind of scared off by Unity (you also can't zoom in enough that the object is more than a few millimeters in size without it colliding with and being cut in half by the POV. :/) but would like to see how some other people make their models. I'd appreciate any protips either of you guys can give, greatly so, if you have the time. Thanks in advance! <3

Edited by bashpr0mpt
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Thank you for trying btw Xellith. Tib found the problem, it was the node settings I imported from the default part (strut) that was causing KSP to **** bricks. Now it's time to make some parts and finish my idiot's guide to part making! :D

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So, I followed the Collada plugin for Blender import instructions (<a href="http://colladablender.illusoft.com/cms/content/blogcategory/23/32/">here</a>) precisely, and Blender still can't import .DAE's properly. Has anyone had any experience with this ****ing up? Why can't anything to do with this work first go when you follow instructions verbatim? :'( Anyone else notice that? :b

I got it working. The instructions were completely incorrect. The file structure was incorrect. The placement of the .py's was incorrect. I had to reverse engineer the way Blender is set up to figure out where the parts went, and then look at the source code for the way it loads up it's modules on start up to replace the current 'collada import / export' that does sweet **** all and make it load that module instead.

Can this **** be any less user friendly? I mean, there's user unfriendly through generic accidental ignorance and oversight. But sweet raptor jesus, entirely wrong instructions, file / folder names, part placement, etc? They've -got- to be ****ing with us when they do **** like that. The worst part is, this is every step of the way with all this free software. It reminds me of my *nix days of YAYAYAYGNUOPENSAUCE optimism where every ****ing thing was incomplete and half arsed with the caveat that if you don't get it working by spending hours ****ing around you're a 'LOLNOOB' for wanting something to work out of the box. D:<

I'll have to add all this shiz into my tute for my fellow nooblings. My people need to know these things to be aware that the rest of the world will mock our stupidity. :'( I've got to say though, I hold four degrees (double bachelors, masters, doctorate) in law and communication sciences. This **** is more complex than any academic endeavor I have ever undertaken. EVER. By far. It ****s on 100,000 page+ decade long constitutional law cases in it's difficulty. I take my hat off to every modder here who can pull off amazing feats.

Edited by bashpr0mpt
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Wow man, you should really try to relax a little. I know it can be frustrating trying to figure some of this junk out, but you're gonna develop an ulcer, heh.

Usually the issue with importing DAEs into Blender is the because they were exported from Maya or something similar. Several of the DAEs in NovaPunch would not import naturally, I had to edit them in a text editor and remove a certain set of <diffuse> tags that have "baked in" texture definitions which Blender doesn't understand and errors out on.

Just search

<diffuse>

for <diffuse> and see if it has texture definitions and references to Maya inside the tag, and delete everything between

<diffuse> and </diffuse>

<diffuse> and </diffuse> and it should import.</diffuse></diffuse>

I really urge you, if you run into things you don't know how to fix, to just come back and ask, rather than get frustrated and rant about it, because I honestly can't tell if you figured out the actual issue or not by reading your post.</diffuse></diffuse></diffuse>

Edited by Tiberion
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To some degree I've figured it out, nerdrage aside. However, there are still intermittent problems where **** just refuses to work and absolutely no sense or reason seems to be involved. I'm unsure whether it's Blender being sketchy, KSP being sketchy, or what. KSP tends to be the culprit behind most problems I've encountered, it's very arbitrary with what will make it freeze up (nodes).

Would you be able to recommend a set way to implement connecting point nodes that doesn't involve changing a number and restarting the game? Because it makes making anything more than a few odd parts extremely impossible time constraint wise, for example, my docking system laying abandoned because it would take me way too many man hours just sorting the nodes out. :/

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The diffuse **** was spot on by the way, you're a champion. Now I can thoroughly redesign the docking mod. As it stood I had to replace every model, and the remaining .DAE couldn't be imported so I had to replace that too. I'd personally prefer to use the existing Erkle clamp, but replace the ORDA parts. I also managed to trim all requisite docking parts down, including the code behind it, to about half it's original size reducing the already memory hungry KSP's need to eat more memory than it has to touch wood. I'm going to resume finishing it and just release it and give it away with broken nodes and hope someone out there can fix them and re-release it I guess.

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There is no way to test nodes aside from loading them up in game, sorry.

Your best bet it to learn to judge and measure distances in blender so your first node attempts are pretty close. Hitting 'N' in edit mode to bring up the properties pane and scrolling down to Numerics - Edge Length will let you see how long an edge is when you select it, and you can measure objects that way. Keep in mind if you do any scaling or rotating from object mode, you need to hit ctrl+A to apply those changes to the mesh itself or the measurments will be off. Scaling and rotations done in edit mode won't mess up your measurments.

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****, bad news, but thanks for giving it to me straight. I fear my models will remain unused in my dev folder now, at least until I get a new PC that doesn't take ten to fifteen minutes to load KSP. :/ KSP doesn't really help matters, it eats more memory than cutting edge games like Skyrim and ****, then develops an intermittent RAM bleed where its consumption will climb exponentially until you're forced to restart it.

To date I have my habitat system, re-modelled mechjeb and isa mapsat into antennae that look snazzy on your ship, an androgynous peripheral attachment system (ORDA + erkle working in unison), a remodelled (slightly) and massively re-rendered variant of the down under space plane using a resized and rerendered buran launch system, and some random space station ****.

If anyone would like to fix the nodes on them, you're welcome to loot my stuff and release it as your own. I would rather just see these things in the game / be able to use them myself. Or if anyone with a modding team is looking for an inventive son of a bitch, I'll happily donate my time and graphics abilities.

I'm still going to hash together a guide to modelling for people that will hopefully overcome the 'what the **** planet am I on?' reaction one has when loading programs that are counter intuitive as **** when it comes to operating them in a manner that will hopefully save them having to RTFM and also save them having to ask asshat questions like I have throughout this thread! I'm chatting to a mate ATM who's interested in turning it into a video, hopefully in a manner that is future-proof.

But, the node problem is me out of the running as a modder for now. There's just no possible way my OCD will sit right with having to reload the game every node change to check it. I don't have that kind of time to commit (I'm estimating at ten minutes per load it'd take at least an hour per part, with thirty odd parts sitting here that's almost a weeks worth of full time employment, I just can't rationalize that.) but as I said above, if anyone wants them, or can put me to work with the parts I can do, I'm down.

My eternal gratitude to those chaps who assisted with this endeavor, and I'm sorry for the disappointment of being unable to bring these projects to completion. Your assistance has, however, been wonderful and I'll ensure that the knowledge is passed on.

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