hoojiwana

You haven't added a collision mesh to your parts. Check out my brief tutorial here for some instructions on how to add one.

Radial Jet Engine (click to view in 3D) Well this thing is just plain neat. Going to be using this for my part previews from now on! Everyone can see what a horrible job I did on the meshes now too, hurrah!

Hooray! FPS destroying lights! When used in the hundreds.

When you get them working, I would be very appreciative if you could pass that knowledge along through a PM or something. Thanks!

I got the original post back from Google Cache, the rest of the posts and such are all there as well but I didn't feel there was much in there that was terribly important to recap. It was mostly just my updates and peoples suggestions. Any information on how to make parts that was in here I'm planning to make little tutorials for anyway.

I probably should've prefaced my little tutorial up there with that before-hand. Hope you can get it all sorted out.

If you look at stages 6 and 7, if you just directly add the .dae and texture folders to KSP, it will automatically default the shadows to Unity defaults. KSP uses slightly different shading that you need to set up in Unity. If you want to set up anything more advanced using textures, those will also need to be done through Unity. That includes normal mapped shading, emissive textures and translucent textures. If you want to do almost anything more advanced than resource stores you will also need to add those in Unity. Things like engines, lights, jet intakes, wheels, docking ports, airlocks and solar panels are some examples.

Oh how I know that feeling.

CGBoorman over on Youtube has some excellent tutorials on Blender. The sound quality is pretty horrendous to start with but it slowly gets better through the episodes. What makes them so good is the logical way he presents information, and constantly reminds you of important hotkeys and techniques.

Alright, what you'll need to do first of all is get Unity from here, as well as the part tools I linked previously. Once that's done, import the pieces of your part into Unity. Drag and drop the .dae and whatever texture files you need across into the open Unity window. Now we build our part! Create an empty GameObject Ensure the GameObject is centered on zero in all three axis, you can find the Transform settings on the right-hand side of the Unity window. Add the KSP Part tools component to this GameObject from the components menu. This can be found as a drop down menu at the top of the window or beneath any existing components on the right hand side. Now you'll want to fill in the details of your part for the exporter. These parts will then be placed inside wherever you selected Unity to use for asset storage when you first opened it. You can name the part and select what texture type you want to use. Now drag and drop the model for your part from Assets inside the Unity window, and place them in the GameObject. Your model should have been automatically rotated in .dae export to fit "Y+ is up" layout of Unity, so you'll probably now see a -90 or 270 degree rotation in your part. This is normal. You'll also notice that your shader is likely a default Unity one. Click on the shader option, and open the KSP option. Then select the shader you wish to use, for now Diffuse is perfectly fine. Drag and drop your texture into the box, or onto the model name in the hierarchy. Now you'll need to add collision. Open the component menu again, and go to Physics. For a simple and small part, a box collider is okay. For now go with Mesh collider. When using the mesh collider, it is very important that you set the mesh to convex. You should see the green highlight that denotes a collision mesh pop up around your model after that. Now the part is ready! Reselect your GameObject under the hierarchy and click Write on the KSP Part Tools window on the right hand side. Unity should then do something, if you get any error messages pop up just click retry on them. Go find where you told Unity to place its Assets, and within those folders should be one called Parts, and inside that should be your part, all wrapped up nicely waiting to be used. Copy them into your KSP install, add your .cfg and you should be ready to go. There is an alternative method to generating a collision mesh for more complex parts that I've gone over here.

Are you exporting your part through Unity and using the Part Tools (0.18) plugin? You can get the plugin from here.

That's a biggun you got there Devo, and I absolutely love that opening nose! Is the cockpit and nose size-compatible with Mk3. Fuselages or is it too big for even those?

So it's not yours then.

I believe that KSP engines used kilo-Newtons for thrust, though I may be wrong. And consider that many parts in KSP are also balanced for gameplay purposes, and may not have any real correlation with a real-world example. Ion engines in KSP have significantly higher thrust capabilities than even the most advanced Ion engines that have been used in the real world.

Blender is a very capable 3D modelling program, and best of all it's free. You'll also need to make textures with something, and after that use the free version of Unity to make your part into a full game object using the 0.18 Part Tools plugin you can download here.

If you set the scene in Blender to use metric as its unit, and as long as you set up all scaling in the CFG to be 1, and don't use any rescaling, then 1m in Blender will come out as 1.25m in KSP. For future reference: 0.5m Blender = 0.625m (probe scale) 1m Blender = 1.25m 2m Blender = 2.5m 3m Blender = 3.75m 4m Blender = 5m Anything bigger than that starts to look ridiculous and act in strange ways with the physics set up. Even 3.75m parts in KW Rocketry for example tend to act a bit weird.

Article here.

You can add various types of physics colliders in Unity and they will work just fine. However you can also create a dummy object that has a much simplified mesh in your 3D modelling program, import that into Unity as well and then use that mesh instead. You do this by creating a new empty GameObject in Unity, naming it node_collider and then placing it in the hierarchy of your part. I'm not 100% sure if you need to rename it node_collider, but I do and it seems to work. Example used also includes thrustTransforms for an engine. The "1mResisto3" is the model for the part. You can then add a Mesh collider to that empty GameObject, and choosing the mesh of your dummy object you've imported in. Make sure you set it to convex. There is a Part Tools (0.18) plugin for Unity that will export your models as .mu, as well as letting you convert textures into .mbm. Unfortunately the topic seems to have been lost with the forum backups and, I don't have a link to the download.

Hello again everyone. Time to get back to making parts I think! To those wondering what happened, there is an article detailing it all over here.

Click for release thread.