I had every intention to at least post something last night. I had a post started, then my night became unfreed. I came back to it way later and got about half of it done, but when I went to post it, the forum logged me out and erased my post. I knew it would happen and I did ctrl+c my post, but for whatever reason it didn't actually copy so I lost it. But that's not really important. So. My probe idea came about while I was messing around in Blender. I added the cylinder mesh and thought to myself it'd be pretty fun to try to make a brain in a jar probe core. I thought about it a bit and decided that modeling the brain would be tough and textures would be tough. I scrapped the idea and started working on a giant Kerbal head probe core, but the brain idea kept coming back and I couldn't shake it so To make the brain mesh, I added a UV sphere and used the sculpt tools with symmetry around either X or Y until I had a shape I thought was reasonably identifiable. To make the texture map, I manually selected the polygons in the "stem" and moved them to one corner of the UV map. I then exported the image and started making a placeholder texture in GIMP. All I did was lasso the corner with the stem, make solid noise, and colorize until I got that look. I then inverted my selection and did the same thing for the rest of the brain. It was originally supposed to be placeholder, but I actually kind of like how it turned out so I think I might keep it. There's only a few polygons that seem out of place on the model, which wouldn't take too long to fix in Blender, but I'm more focused on finishing it rather than it looking perfect for the moment. I had a few issues with texturing the jar at first. This isn't the exact problem I had, but it was pretty similar. Basically because the textures are one sided, I could see the outer shell of the jar, but looking through the "glass" I couldn't see anything on the inside. My solution for this was just duplicating the cylinder and mapping the inside cylinder to a slightly modified texture. With one cylinder pointing outward and one pointing inward, the problem was fixed and I didn't need to figure out how to add depth to the model and further complicate the texture maps. And here's the resized texture maps for the jar So with all the modeling done, I exported and loaded up Unity for the first time. After figuring out the scaling issues, I ran into an issue with the textures not loading properly. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that the problem was the shaders, but once I figured it out and played around with the options a bit, this is the best I could come up with using the KSP shaders: All in all, I think it's ready to be loaded up into the game. I added the attachment nodes in blender and reoriented them in Unity, so that shouldn't be an issue. For the .cfg file, I just copied the OKTO's file and edited it. I removed the reaction wheels module because there's no space in the jar for reaction wheels to go, but I left the level 0 stability control I think. I also bumped up the power consumption a bit. One thing I really wanted from this probe was the ability to crew report with a transmission penalty, because I figured the brain could observe and record data about it's surroundings, but since it was probably pulled from a dead Kerbal, the ability to relay that information would be hindered. So if you wanted 100% value from the crew report, the probe would have to be recovered, and no more crew reports could be taken. At least in theory. I'm not sure if a brain in a jar has been done before, but I've never come across one. I was thinking that if I could find time, I'd like to make variants of this design, like a dome/fishbowl design for aerodynamic purposes. But I'm not holding my breath for that to actually happen. - - - Updated - - - I loaded my brain into KSP (that's a weird sentence). There must have been an issue with the export from Unity because the transparency wasn't working properly. When I opened it again in unity, all the shaders got changed to the standard diffuse again so I'm not sure if something happened there but I re-exported with proper shaders and MBM textures and again with PNG textures just to try things out. I don't think I'll have time to boot the game up again until later today, but I should have at least something else to report. I forgot to make sure the SAS level was right, but at least the crew report thing works. (Judging from the picture though, the SAS thing didn't work.)
