esinohio

Wooo hooo!!!! It worked!!! Weight painted the vertices in the tracks into their own group. That solved everything!! Now I just need to track down or make a decent tracked vehicle texture and I'll be able to do decent surface shots. Thanks again for that memory jog Sma!!!

For the deformation I just made a quick and dirty mask using texture painting onto a blank image. Makes a nice black and white image that serves as the displacement map and the texture mask. Any white area will be displaced falling off to no displacement on the black. What I'm missing now, and what I think your seeing or not seeing in the image above, is actual displacement within the tracks themselves. That simple addition would add the depth to match the normal map on the track texture and add all the proper shadowing. That is going to involve deforming the mesh only in the masked area. Not really sure how to pull that off. Feels like I'm so close!!! *edit .. Vertex groups... the answer is vertex groups. It was your dynamic paint reference above that jogged it. The dynamic paint adds vertices into and out of the groups dynamically. Since I'm doing a static picture I just need to add the displaced area into its own vertex group. Then add the second displacement to it. I think that is it!

After some tinkering around I think I managed to make some passable tracks in sand. Of course the colors are a bit askew there but that is easily fixed. Just wondering if those look like passable, if somewhat deep, tracks in sand. Hoping to cobble together some interesting surface rover scenes but without any tracks its just not working.

That particular texture is like a diffuse or glossy texture, no UV mapping required. Its completely generated via procedure. So I'm guessing I'll have to make single user copies of that texture for the smaller plates. Then dive into the code a bit to see if I can adjust its scaling. Fun fun! lol Doing the tire tracks is a bit tedious but I'm learning. Making a displacement map to show ruts in the ground is easy enough to do but I've had some issues getting the ruts to display the tire tracks properly. So the idea is to use the displacement map to change the ground mesh with ruts from the tracks. Then where you have ruts appearing apply a texture that further displaces the area thus giving the appearance of textured tracks. I know it involves using a mask similar to the one you make for the displacement. Just need to break down and figure it out in cycles. Using dynamic painting would be another way of doing this that might work. Certainly would make more sense for an animation. I might look into this method to see if I can get it to work. Getting the tracks to show should be easy using dynamic paint but I'm wondering how you would get the displacement to go along with it? Wouldn't the tracks just appear as flat textures on the sand? Even with a normal map applied it will look wonky without a displacement to go with it. As for others not rendering I'm not sure. Starwhip stopping just stinks I loved his shot setups and backgrounds. They looked more like art designed for big posters. Oh well, to YouTube with me for more tutorials!!!!

A quick one I threw together to see how the desert camo procedural texture I found would work on one of Zekes big tanks. Aside from an odd scaling issue on the smaller panels I think it came out ok.

The ground shakes as the mighty Saturbo V lifts our intrepid trio upward into history. Find this awesome craft file designed by GusTurbo and forum thread here.

Jeb and Bill strike a pose in front of their MU SSY-0001 Tonfa. Craft designed by ScriptKitt3h of The Mechani Union. Thread located here.

I forgot to add another tweak. Under your render settings then light paths. Change the Volume bounces to at least 1 if you haven't already. Otherwise I think the smoke will look all weird.

The attribute field with flame is capitalized. Not sure if that makes a difference but those fields are very picky. Try all lower case. **Edit Confirmed, change your flame attribute to all lower case and you will be FLAME ON!!! With some luck the upcoming updates to Blender are going to include some more polish for the flame simulation. That GPU rendering for flames is so tantalizingly close!!!

I'd go here: https://youtu.be/u-zK7Bu8cAI I know its a tad long but its full of great info! Near the beginning he goes through setting up a fire simulator in cycles. I like his tutorials because they are usually very clear and to the point. As he is explaining the sim he points out a few tweaks to make the fire do things like roar out or just kind of flicker. He also covers setting up the material node. When using the Quick Smoke to add fire/smoke to an item Blender leaves off the part of the material that makes it actually glow or emit any light. Nice of them huh lol Below are a few screenshots I took that show a few different ways to setup the material nodes and sim. *edit smoke density is controlled by the value attribute in the multiply node just above the color ramp in the picture. So, between the values up there you can get some really interesting flames. It can be a bit confusing getting the amount of flames dialed in. I'd recommend just creating a new scene, select the default cube, press spacebar and type Quick Smoke and select it from the list. Now just play around with the sim values. **edit 2 He doesn't mention this specifically but I'll save you a lot of hell in advance. Save your project often! Right after you setup the sim, save. After you make a single change and want to rebake it, save!!!! And lastly give your smoke cache a name!! I like to name it and click that external check box and make a directory just for the cache. If you ever want multiple smoke sims in one scene, this is critical!!!! Also if you do want multiple smoke sims in one scene move them to separate layers!!!! Weird and bad things happen with multiple sims on one layer. Even weirder things happen with multiple sims that don't have specific cache locations defined. Hopefully this will save you the headache of waiting a few hours for a highly detailed sim to bake only to find out something wonky between two smoke sims blew it all up.

Trolling the Spacecraft Exchange thread and came across this gem! Look here I was in fanboy mode as soon as I saw that stock prop and stock parts engine he built. Now I'm not sure how prevalent this level of engineering is or if that had been done before since I hadn't read much of those forums prior to this darn Blender mod consuming my life but I was just blown away since it was the first time I'd seen such a thing. The cockpit lighting, control stick, rudder pedals, throttle, and gauges had me floored.

Have you changed your computing device to CUDA? If your not using flame simulations you can usually save a ton of time by using the GPU to do the crunching on your frames. It can be faster sometimes depending on the scene,samples,etc. Go to your User Preferences under the File menu. Then click the system tab at the top. Now scroll down a bit and on the lower left you should see an area labeled Compute Device. Change that to CUDA and select your card from the drop down. This can dramatically reduce render times. If you are using an Nvidia card that is.

Here is a quick one I threw together for you. The blend file is slooowly uploading to my Google drive as we speak. I'll link it when its all done. I kept it simple to make it a bit easier for you to dive into. A pilot landing the JigaBachi-02 on the deck with signals from another Kerbal.

Sure! I'd be happy to play around with that one. If you have any screenshots floating about that would be great. Helps me get parts that import a little funky back into their proper place, like that little guy orphaned near the tail of your cool plane.

Thanks! I used the model here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/95782-Rigged-Kerbal-3D-Model?p=1458919&viewfull=1#post1458919 I'm having fun now changing the suit colors around to match some of the custom suits I see floating here in the forums.

Jeb and Bill explore the surface of Ike. Jeb clearly approves of the low gravity! Craft designed by Starwhip and located here.

Discovered the wonderful world of BVH motion capture files. Can't model a Kerbal for crap but thought this would be funny none the less... Someone with actual talent could have a ball with this stuff lol

Oh that would be perfect for an animation lol Cut it like the show where it stops mid jump and that announcer guy adds his banter. <-- now tries to claw that song out of his head You know, it would be a snap to change the hair colors on those Kerbals to match Bo and Luke.... no.. must ... resist....

Ohh a nice two seater. Really like the car streamlined styling there. I think I'll get into some trouble with this one soon

Trying to get a passable Duna surface and I don't think I'm there yet. Threw the stock Skycrane and rover in for fun. Now I just need to make or find an interesting stock rover for further surface testing renders.

Ignite plasma engines!! Craft from IrresponsibleCaptNathan in the Steam forums. Earth from Blend file I've been tinkering with.

Not done any animations here yet but looking into it. I have a couple small videos I've done in KSP that I'd like to redo completely in Blender or some combination of the KSP and Blender animations. As for renders, I'm currently dumping way to much in the fan works "Show off your Blender Render" section. Can't help it! Dang mod is so much fun! Can't say it enough Dasoccerguy, Thanks a ton for this Blender mod!!!!! I'm salivating over that Kerbal I see on your front page here. It looks great!

I saw this plane in Starwhip's thread here . Starwhip's stuff is flat out awesome so I hope you clicked that!!!! The plane itself was designed by noname117 and can be found here. I see myself melting down my processor rendering some of Nonames aircraft..... Jeb and Bill take the NAFA-5-C1 Wailing Banshee for a spin high above Kerbin.

Three Laythe aerial explorers are put through their paces high above a countryside on Kerbin before launch deployment.

Here ya go! Edges softened a bit. Better?