Aetherdyne

I posted the most recent things I'm fooling around with to my blag here on the forums in this post. I'll probably post things more there in the future, unless I'm releasing an update or discussing something here. Incidentally, the current version of the files now includes Kerbol as its own star as described above.

Oh, didn't I say that my project was the Kerbal Spaceship Pinups channel? ... No, wait. That's not true. Basically, it's a mesh I can use to make various differently-dressed Kerbals. Since I'll need several, I didn't want to model the clothing directly in (and will probably use cloth physics to do it anyway). I just haven't gotten around to making the specific clothed versions yet. (And the censor bar is just for my amusement; he's about as anatomically correct as a Ken doll.) I'll have a look, though I personally don't use Max. Previously I used Lightwave, and nowadays I use Blender. Still, a lot of it could transfer over. Heh. Thanks.

Oh, sure, I know how that goes. I just figure that feedback will be more useful early rather than when you are already done.

That's not unusual; people will open a thread but not watch the video for many reasons. They might simply wish to see what the thread is about. They might realize they don't have time to watch a video right then, and make a note to come back and do so later (if it seems interesting). There might even be people who clicked the thread by accident. And not everyone coming to a thread is a new reader: they may have already seen the video, and simply be back to read the discussion. Some observations, which I hope will help: - I think your kerbals would look a bit better if they were a paler green, possibly with a more yellow tint. At least, that's how the official kerbals look to me. - I'd agree with the audio balance comments earlier ... the music is too loud relative to the dialogue. - I would speed up their motions a bit (limb movements and such) ... not necessarily make each motion take less time overall, but rather to make each motion start and stop faster. It would tend to inject a bit more life into their movements. - It appears (based on the specular highlight on their eyeballs and on the shadows) that you are using a single light located in front of the scene with some ambient light; this makes everything look flat and the shadows very harsh. You should probably kill any ambient light in the scene and use a three-point (studio) light setup if you aren't using Global Illumination. And since there's a large window and it isn't completely black outside, maybe a faint bluish backlight coming from outside the window. Your lights should also have a falloff (so they aren't the same brightness to infinity). In particular, this would mean that the patio outdoors would have much more of a blue tint due to the sky outside affecting them more than the light on the Kerbals does. - The window itself looks like dull grey plastic at the moment, which is mainly an issue with that large specular highlight on the material. Specular highlights are mostly just "cheats" for the reflections caused by very bright light sources. They are large and dull like this where the surface is rough on a microscopic scale and scatters the rays randomly, but not so rough and so random that a highlight is completely indistinguishable. Glass is not like that; unless it is frosted, dirty, or cloudy, it doesn't scatter reflected light much at all ... window glass in particular tends to reflect a fairly clear mirror image, when it reflects at all, otherwise it is transparent. So the window should either be very obvious (small, bright reflection of the light source, with the rest of the objects in the scene reflected too), or it should not be visible at all (no highlight, no reflections). I'd lean toward making it mostly invisible, but realistically in this scene it would be acting a lot like a mirror given how dark the exterior is. - You shouldn't use camera motion to switch from subject to subject like this, at least not often. It's certainly a valid technique to change focus to a different subject, but this is generally used more sparingly and for one of a few particular reasons: * To establish the overall scene before you begin. Look at the first fifteen seconds of the . The camera starts out focused on the text on the side of one of several crates, then gradually moves to focus on a kerbal rooting through a different crate.* You are introducing something completely new to a scene, often for added drama. Imagine a furious space battle against desperate odds; after the last explosion, you see the hero's ship has (barely) survived, and someone on the radio says "Thank god, all enemies have been destroyed. We are now safe" ... and that's when the music picks up again and the camera turns to show the arrival of the *second* wave. * You are drawing attention to something that has been present in the background all along (or at least for an unknown amount of time), or the effect the scene has had on something in the background. Two Kerbals are sitting at a restaurant table eating lunch, talking about some cute kerbalettes that were flirting with them at the counter. They get up and leave, and instead of the camera following them or immediately changing scenes, you pan over to reveal that one kerbal's girlfriend was sitting at the next table eating her own lunch and now looks very distressed ... uh-oh! If you use camera motion instead as your primary means of changing camera angles, making each scene one long continuous shot with the camera pausing and then moving from angle to angle as new people talk, it will feel very computer animation-y, and sensitive people may even get sick from all of the camera motion. I don't know which software you are using, but most of the packages I'm aware of allow you to add multiple cameras. You add a camera for each (usually static) angle, and render the frames for that segment separately. Then you assemble them in your editor (no fancy transitions, just a cut to the next camera). In the steam announcement video above, for example, there are cuts to new camera angles at 16, 18, 22, 28, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, and 41 seconds. The camera only moves between those points for two real reasons: dramatic effect, or to track the movement of a kerbal within the scene. Alternately, you can just move a single camera from position to position in the space of one frame.

Hopefully it is helpful. I was poking around the spreadsheet file, and I think I figured out a way to make it a bit easier to cope with in the next version. I've started moving toward making it less fiddly when you have multiple tabs for planets and moons ... now for a moon (for example) you'd just specify the name of the tab the planet data is on and which planet it is, and the sheet grabs the info it needs that way. There will also be a way to specify which planets/moons to include in the output so you don't have to manually remove the extra lines that aren't being used. It will take me awhile to fully switch the spreadsheet over to the new methods, though. The next version will also include Kerbol itself as an extra star (they aren't hard to add, I just needed to remind myself how to do it). If you don't want to wait, here are the contents that you should save as kerbol.stc and place in the same locations as ksp-kerbol.ssc ####################### # Kerbol.stc # # This places the system about 5ly "behind" Altair, chosen mostly because Forbidden Planet ####################### "Kerbol" { # Star name RA 297.6958 # J2000 Right Ascension in degrees Dec 8.8797 # J2000 Declination in degrees Distance 20 # Distance from Sun in Light Years SpectralType "K5V" # MK spectral and luminosity classification AppMag 15 # Apparent visual brightness Radius 231999.98 # Radius in km } ####################### Kerbol's exact type is, of course, ambiguous according to the wiki, so I just made it a very, very small orange main sequence star. The apparent magnitude value is even more arbitrary (actually, it's just the number that was in whichever file I was looking at for the format). After you create that file, you will need to open both ksp-kerbol.ssc and start.cel and search-and-replace every instance of "Gliese 35" with "Kerbol" in order to move the planets there and make celestia go to the new star when you open it.

Good job. I am also a 3d artist, though mostly in my spare time, so I'm always interested to look at other's work. I especially liked that you got the Kerbal walk down pretty well. Though I haven't gotten my own project (a teaser for a video series) very far along yet, I've nearly gotten my Kerbal modeled, at least.

Last week, I saw a thread suggesting possible additional planets elsewhere on the forums, and it occurred to me that people might want to fool around with those suggested planets in Celestia, which is a free astronomy exploration program available here. I'm no stranger to modifying Celestia with fictional star systems; I did it a fair amount several years ago with the Terran Trade Authority series, including creating some of the planetary textures. More to the point, I created a spreadsheet back then to ease the burden of designing new systems for Celestia, which I am making available (see below) so people can do this sort of thing themselves. Instructions for use are included, though they may be slightly out-of-date, in that there's a new tab to centralize the output which is not currently described. I'll warn you that the process is a bit fiddly, but I think it's better than doing it all by hand. I've also included a very preliminary rendition of the canonical Kerbal star system -- mostly it just has all of the named bodies at their proper sizes and orbital positions. It does not currently include textures, meshes, etc. to make the planets look like they do in-game, though I went to some effort to find stand-ins. I currently use a few textures I already had lying about from my TTA work (included) as well as some real solar system textures (which come with Celestia). For example, Mars is pretending to be Duna, and Earth is pretending to be Kerbin. Actual textures for some Kerbal planets and moons can be obtained from the KSP wiki, and of course potentially from KSP itself, but I haven't done this for you ... I'd prefer to make my own high-res versions. Just haven't gotten to it yet. Because Kerbol is not a real star, and I haven't gotten around to adding it to Celestia's database, I am currently putting the planets in orbit around Van Maanen's Star, a white dwarf about 14 light-years from Earth (white dwarves are very small ... actually a lot smaller than Kerbol should be, but it's just a quick fix). A script is included that will cause Celestia to travel to this star and thence to Kerbin when you start the program. To get the system into Celestia, backup your current start.cel file (if you care about it) and then unpack the archive into the main Celestia directory. It should place everything into the correct directory. Let me know if you run into any issues. The spreadsheet and texture files are under the CC-BY-NC license.

The Flag Designer SVG file I posted earlier has been updated. More layers, more tutorial, and a handful of foreground elements. Also fixed the stripes. In the spirit of the thread, here are some flags I made with a little fiddling around (the names are just what I thought of when I made them): Purple People Eater: Marvin: Hornet:

Hey, folks. Thought I'd put this out there for people to use. (It's an SVG file for inkscape that I made on a whim, that lets you create basic flags.) It's not very far along yet (it currently lacks foreground devices for example), but it can serve as a starting point for folks, as it has a more varied selection of field divisions and patterns than (say) the flag generator up thread, and you can customize the colors and such arbitrarily. There's a readme file with tips and other info -- even a (very basic) tutorial. Note that I'm not being judgemental with my "tips on good flags". If you want to break those rules, feel free. I do it myself. But it's best to break rules as a informed choice, not an accident. The tips are fairly obvious, and just there to let people know some of the reasons (real) flags look the way they do, and thus help them make flags that look like such, if that's what they want.