Knight of St John

Hey Zorg. I've been having a look at your WIP waterfall plumes. They look really nice, and I especially like the trick you use to extend the cylinders very far and set the falloff high. You get really realistic looking vac plumes without many mesh artifacts. I'll be copying that strategy :-) Also: I noticed that you don't do much with the insides of the engine bells (that I've noticed) They look a bit strange without any exhaust inside them. So I've been experimenting how to make them look better. This is what I came up with for the hydrolox Rhino: I'm using a cylinder that "hugs" the inside engine bell wall for the blue light. And for the flame core I'm actually using a simple plume, but with the cylinder set to zero brightness, and squeezed all the way inside the bell. This way, the planes get very close together, and with the right falloff settings and brightness, you can make it look very "3D". It gives the illusion of a very hot gas coming out of the combustion chamber. How do you like it? Spot anything unrealistic here? Looking for some feedback.

Oh I don't see it as complaining. Just "constructive criticism" But i see your point. I guess I would lean your way too. However, for the mainsail and skipper, I really dislike giving it hydrolox plumes, given their low ISP, and the fact that otherwise there'd be almost only hydrolox engines in the game. So I think I'll make them RP1 engines. Aside from that, I'll try to stick to your strategy. By the way, doesn't realplume have methalox configs for the rapier too? or does it just have the methane plume in airbreathing mode? my config has them both being methane/air and methalox.

Right. KSP is really inconsistent with these engine stats. On the one hand, the hypergolic engines have ISP's of around 320s irl, a lot worse than hydrolox, but in-game they have a better ISP than the supposed hydrolox engines. So it really all depends if you look at the inspiration the devs used for the engines, or the actual stats of them.

Aha I see now. Yea, I basically looked at the ISP's and matched them with a propellant that makes sense. But switching to a different fuel just means messing around with the colors a bit :-) And I think I might actually do that. From what I can find on the interwebs, the Aerozine plume looks clear/white to red-ish at sea level, but clear/white/slightly blue in vacuum. I especially like your vacuum plume. It looks very realistic, much more so than my versions. I gotta check out how you configured that.

They can yes, but you'll have to mess around with the relative scales and positions a bit to make them fit well. Also, I have an issue/question. The 2 variants of the poodles don't position the plumes on the exact same spot relative to the engine bells. this means i would have to move the plume up a little to make it fit on the 2-engine-bell-variant: But as far as I know, this is not possible, as you can't configure different template positions for different variants of the same engine?

wow these look nice. I might "steal" some from the github lol. If I see that correctly in the config, you use: but the engineID can vary depending on the engine. just check in the original part file for the engineID in the ModuleEnginesFX module. Not sure if this is the cause of your issue though. And for another update on my work: I've made a vacuum methalox plume for the poodle and terrier: It might still be a bit too purple though heh. We went for a methalox plume here because we want to make the cheetah and wolfhound hydrolox engines (because they are even better isp-wise)

Are you working on plumes for the stock engines too? (like I am) Or engines from mods? Cuz it'd be kinda wasteful if we do the same job twice :-)

So I've been working on the rapier closed cycle Methalox plume: Which turned out well i think. However In the vacuum plume, I get these poorly color-discretized concentric circles: I hope you understand what i mean. The plane mesh colors are heavily discrete here, and aren't varying smoothly. Does anyone know how to manage this? Does it have anything to do with the brightness settings in combination with the color settings? Adjusting the falloff makes it smaller of course, but there are still those color rings.

Went for a Hydrolox Plume for the Rhino.

On a slightly different note: I've noticed that there are darker edges along the sides of the plumes. Does this have anything to do with the color blending procedure that is used? Is this a unity thing, or can you patch that inside your mod? Don't laugh at me, but this is a minute physics video that explains what this is I think:

Ah! so that's what that does lol. Okay I suspected as much. I got the poodle working and didn't exactly know how i did it, so it's probably that one of my attempts included overriding that.

All of this lines up with what I was vaguely grasping at. This will speed up my process a lot. thanks :-)

Oh this is actually very helpful. I just looked into your rs-68 config. You use a lot of simple "cilinder" effect models i see, and almost no complex or simple plume models with plane meshes. And when you do use the plane meshes, you keep them very subtle and low brightness. I'm new to all of this so I honestly have no clue what the different shaders do, I just copy other peoples combinations. I suspect the type of shader has to do with the angle the camera is pointing and how visible they are at what angle? and maybe they also influence how 2 meshes overlap? Anyways, I still have to figure out a way how to make my plumes look decent from looking straight down on them, and the plane meshes are not doing that for me.

Very nice. I like your outer mach arches better than mine even. The shape is a bit better I feel. Also: how did you do the diamonds? I used the existing shock diamond from the rs25 and modified it into the diamond shape, but this looks different. Btw: you can use some random perlin noise controllers to make the position and size of the diamonds wiggle a bit, so the flame looks more dynamic.

Hmm. It's not that hard to use existing templates for other engines. The mod allows you to use the same plumes for different engines and scale/move them so they match the nozzle size and position. So in theory, adding plumes to the RO engines for instance isn't too labor-intensive, but creating all new ones to be 100% accurate to real life is probably too much effort for me. So we'll see, but don't get your hopes up. The nozzle glows that much because the engine is super overheated. that's the infinite fuel hack from the F12 debug menu doing that. This normally doesn't happen. I haven't made any plumes for engine variants yet. I'll still have to see if I get that figured out or not. feel free to copy the config. I guess it would be nice to mention somewhere in the notes that you got it from me though ;-)

Sorry for posting here so often. But I wanted to let you all know I kind of figured out how to work with this mod. The visibility issue of the plumes when viewed from above are due to the plane meshes that were not bright enough. I still feel like those plane meshes are a bad solution for this, since it kinda looks weird sometimes. But anyways... It's still ten billion times better than the prefab particles :-) And I was able to make this rs25 engine plume very realistic: I'm continuing the work on the other engines too. I've completed most of them though. I think I'll be releasing the final config as a mod... maybe?

So I was able to create Waterfall configs for most of the stock engines that also had WaterfallRestock configs: However, the Poodle and Twin-Boar (both have 2 nozzles) Somehow don't work. The Waterfall effect doesn't show, even though it should. A template is applied in the editor and everything. Aside from that, I also noticed that the "waterfall-hydrolox-rs25-1" template gives you this red plume for the Mammoth and Vector engines, but when viewed straight down the engine bell, the plume almost vanishes. Is this normal, and could it be made more visible in that orientation too?

Alright, sorry for not responding sooner. (Although I doubt you were waiting on my response ;-) ) I decided to try and make a set of configs for as many of the stock engines as I can, based on your WaterfallRestock config files. After some digging I managed to get it to work for the Reliant engine. I had Issues where it would still display the original Squad particle effects. Then I looked into the Restock mod's configs, and saw that you deleted some fx keys there before adding your own EFFECTS{} . So basically I copied that part from the Restock configs, and it all works now. Now for all of the other engines... *starts sweating nervously*

Hi there. I've been trying out KS3P for the first time, but when i enable the color grading effect, i get these red dots everywhere. Do you guys have any idea how to fix this?

I see. I might have a look into it then, and see if i can bootstrap the plumes for restock to stock. Graphics performance doesn't impact the physics simulation, or at least it shouldn't. And small differences still count, especially if you are part of a community that is comparing missions.

Why isn't there a config file for the stock engines? And yes, I am aware that there is a config file for the restock mod, which are the stock engines, but retextured. This mod is great, however since apparently some of the colliders and drag cubes / aerodynamics differ from the stock models, it can not be considered stock. This stops many players from using the Restock mod, or Waterfall. I'm sort of looking for a way to use the beautiful engine plumes of this mod, but without messing with the stock models.