Cheebsta

Ahh, good point. Animation is something I never fooled with much, but this will be handy for future reference.

Do you possibly mean you only stay there indefinitely on paper? As in a mathematically equation says it's possible, but it doesn't actually work in the real world? Strange, I vaguely recall saying that in the first place.

By all means link, or even just directly steal the text, I don't mind in the slightest if it's being put to use helping others learn. Also, thanks. I can never tell if what I post is useful or just more confusing, haha.

If your collider is not actually convex Unity will fill it in when you tick the convex box. If you see that happening it's a good idea to rework the collider a little, or break it up into pieces. Also, select all faces. Mesh -> Faces -> Shade Smooth. Then down bottom add an Edge Split modifier. Play with the angle. When the model is *all* done, apply the Edge Split. What it will do is duplicate any edges that are currently rendered "sharp" in the viewport, which prevents smooth shading across that edge in the game. You can also do this manually if Edge Split won't cooperate in certain areas. @Raz; You don't even have to set the colliders as children. When you drop a .blend into the Unity scene it should automatically generate a Game Object that is parent to all the meshes in the .blend.

Lagrange points are *exact* locations. The precision simply does not exist in the natural world to find an exact position. Of course you can put something very close to where these points should be, and gain most of the benefits, but you're still not directly on it. The satellites using them, orbit them, and most of them do indeed require regular burns to maintain position. Trojan asteroids also drift. Even if it takes them a billion years to fall out of orbit, they drift. If not, how would an object fall out of L4 to collide with Earth in the first place?

I mentioned it a little in my wall of text on Blender, lol. But yeah, that's generally it. If you're making cylinders, just make another cylinder around the same size, and turn down the number of sides (bottom left of edit Window in Blender when you first add the cylinder, sometimes hidden under all the buttons). It's usually better to let things go slightly through the surface of your main mesh than to have them floating above it, so you do also usually want the collider a little smaller. Same size doesn't usually hurt and saves a couple seconds resizing. Name does not matter, but I usually make it something easy to find in the Unity hierarchy later. In Unity pick the collider out of the hierarchy, remove the MeshRenderer Component and apply a Mesh Collider. That's that. Make sure the material is on the main model, and add the KSP Part Tools component to the parent Object, not one of the children.

Do you have any idea if KSP registers collisions between children of the same parent object? Some games do and some do not. This is my first time messing with a Unity game, and I just started in the last ~10 days. I've actually been modelling/modding for the last ~15 years

You can always add more zeros behind the decimal in the real world. That makes it impossible to hit Lagrange with absolute precision. "Really really close" is not the same thing, that is why they are considered theoretical points.

I think slow and steady into Jupiter, or the Sun itself, is the only way based on available energy sources. Unless of course you can turn all of the worlds sand into glass and get started on my giant death ray, or make power plants run on paper clips. Also, Venus would have to reverse orbit and hit us head on to even stand a chance of obliterating Earth. Most likely we'd just end up looking like Mars with a binary moon.

It should be noted that Lagrangian points are mostly a mathematical concept. It's much easier to stay in them on paper where zero actually exists.

Maybe that's not what you meant, but that is what you said. "Use a box, or create them all in Unity" What I was saying is just that sometimes the best mesh has to be made in modelling software. If you consider the example I gave of the cylinder. You might want 16-32 faces to get a nice rounded model into the game. Unity will happily generate a valid mesh collider for your cylinder with the same number of faces, and a box collider is a rather bad choice for round things. Capsules also have more faces than the 8 sided, 32 face, collider you can make in Blender and have Unity turn into a collider for you. Another example would be an octagonal or hex probe body with a beveled edge. Primitives are out again, and the bevel will cause Unity to create faces you don't need for an effective collision mesh, so again, making just a single octagonal object in Blender is the better option. Then again, I am also working on some rather high poly parts which do just fine with simple box colliders. What I am not trying to say is that either method is superior to the other, only that both are useful, and it takes a little practice to know what you should actually use.

I did get a lot of info from hoojis thread, but also noticed there were about 12 Blender related threads on the first page of this forum. I was trying to condense just that stuff into a single location, as well as update/add to some of the things that are outdated or not well described in those links.

I have been leaving rescale out entirely, so that is probably it then. Thanks.

Many cylinders, and cones, need mesh colliders, but letting Unity generate them will result in a lot more faces than what is needed. It is good to try and use primitives when possible, but you shouldn't feel like using a mesh collider is a bad idea under the right circumstances. There are times when the different types of colliders all serve a purpose. Khaos; I use smart projection just to make sure all the faces get mapped. Too low of a setting scatters the faces all over the UV map, but retains their shape and aspect ratio. Higher settings will keep the faces together, but may deform them. It just takes practice to learn when things look okay. Also use an island margin of 0.03. Then it will leave 2-3 pixels between the faces it breaks apart so colors don't bleed from one face to the next. For areas of detail I select just those faces and then use plain "Unwrap", scale, and place the UVs manually. Never tried making wings for KSP, so I am not sure if shape matters for flight? But try doing the cross section of the wing as a rectangle before shaping it otherwise. That will make it a lot easier to maintain and even looking leading and trailing edge. You could also try applying an actual picture of a wing as a texture to a plane in Blender, then placing that plane behind your model and using Orthographic views to match it polygon wise. Anyone have any idea why for me it takes 80cm in Blender to equal 1m in KSP? All the scales I know how to find are set at 1.0, but even my attach nodes have this 1.25 error.

When most people hear "big bang levels of energy" they tend to think gigantic explosion. When you tell them "so small if it happened on the table right in front of you, you'd barely even hear it", dreams of particle accelerated super weapons and Earth consuming black holes tend to vanish pretty quickly. That's all I was aiming at...

I was more or less just trying to put some perspective on how much energy would be required to create a massive singularity.

I think the total effective force of particle collisions in the LHC is about the same as two mosquitoes flying into each other?

Throw a rock in the mud. The hole allows you to observe that the rock has passed through the mud, but the medium used to make that observation has also altered the behavior of the rock. You have to get absurd about it to make massive examples, lol. Normally its things like the teeny bit of energy absorbed or release by a thermometer changing the temperature by 0.000000000000000000001 degrees or something like that.

Put a giant magnifying glass into orbit between the Earth and the sun.

I was really hoping maybe there was a state based way to call animations, like sounds, but was worried that the answer would be the one you've given once I started looking at how the Kethane mod handles similar situations. Thanks for the input.

This is probably a stupid question, but trial and error has thus far failed. Is it possible for the "Activate Generator" and "Shutdown Generator" buttons in the GUI provided by ModuleGenerator to start and stop an animation? I can get the animation to work fine via the "toggle" button that pops up when I use ModuleAnimateGeneric, but that does not activate the generator itself, and the generator buttons do not activate the animation... It seems like there should be something really simple here I am missing?

This information seems to be scattered across a zillion threads, so I thought I would do others a favor and try to compile everything I've found here. Not much of this is stuff I actually figured out, but I can't say I was paying all that much attention when looking for it to be able to properly credit those who I got the info from. Suffice to say, I owe many thanks to several members of this forum. Anywho, here is what I cobbled together: 1. Half the written tutorials on the internet will have you doing far more work than needed. 2. Get Unity. Don't groan. Just do it. Your stuff is not going to work right without it, and no, there is no way to convince Blender to do it. Import the KSP Part Tools package from the Assets -> Import Package -> Custom Package dialogue. Open Part Tools from the Tools menu and tell it where your KSP GameData folder is. 3. Use the "Assets" folder made by Unity as your storage place for developing parts. You may find it useful to add other folders inside there. For example I have "Textures", "Materials", "KSP Prefabs", and "UV layouts". Unity will detect changes to these files and folders automatically. Unity will export .mu and material files to the folder you set for each part when you give them a Part Tools component. 4. In KSP; Alt+F12 -> Database -> Reload All is your friend. 5. It's not a terrible idea to have a stock KSP install reserved for development. This will load faster and avoid the need to troubleshoot unforeseen conflicts with other mods until you're sure yours actually works. To make the simplest of models: Open up Blender, delete the default camera and light. Select the default cube and switch to edit mode. Select all the faces of the cube and UV map it. Split the viewport and put the new window into UV mode. Create a new image that's 512x512. A black image should appear in the UV window, and the cube should go dark too. Now you can switch the main viewport to Texture Paint and add some color to the cube. More often than not though you will want to export the UV layout from the window showing the UV map, and then use something like GIMP to make your textures. Save both the .blend and your texture into the Unity Assets folder. Open Unity. If you don't see your resources in the bottom center of the window, click on the "Assets" folder in the bottom left-ish of the window. Drag and drop the .blend file into the Unity scene. If the model is missing its texture look in your Assets folders for the material and drag and drop that onto the model. If the material was not generated, right click in the Asset preview area and select Material. Click on the new material, give it a KSP shader, and then click on the "Select" button in the box down and a little to the right from where you pick the shader. From there select your texture file, and then drop the material onto the model. Since the only thing in the hierarchy for this should be the cube, click on that, then click "Add Component". Pick Physics -> Box Collider. Tick "Concave". Now add a KSP -> Part Tools component. Change the name (default: "NewModel") to "model". Set the directory to the directory you made to store the part (more on that in a sec). Click "Write". All the part should need now is a part.cfg file. If you made your own collision mesh in Blender then your model will have an arrow next to it in the Unity hierarchy. - Add the KSP Part Tools component to the very top level, or "parent", then add the colliders the appropriate child mesh. - Remove the "MeshRenderer" component from any mesh you don't want to show up in game. - Make sure you click Concave when using a Mesh Collider. - If doing so causes your collider to warp way out of the shape you want then you need to break it down into several simpler meshes. - Your collision mesh/es can have any name, you do not need to call them "node_collider". There can also be other static meshes in the scene, like say, an antennae, which are rendered but play no role in collisions. If you want to add a hatch; Make sure the origin of your main mesh in Blender is inside one of its collision meshes. Make a cube about 50cm high, 50cm wide and 5cm thick and place it where you want the hatch. In Unity the Y (green) goes up, and Z (blue) faces in the direction Kerbals are ejected. Name the cube something easy to remember. Repeat the same procedure for ladders, except make the cube however tall you want the ladder to be, and point the Z axis in the direction Kerbals should face while climbing. Place the face of the box closest to the model approximately where the hands and feet should go. Do not put it inside your other collision meshes. It may be possible to overlap hatches and ladders though. After doing that, select your boxes in Unity and give them Physics colliders, as well as remove the Mesh Renderer. I also tick the "Is Trigger" box, but I am not sure its needed. In the top right of Unity you should see Tags and Layers. Click Tags and go to Add Tag. Off to the right of "Element0" click, it's hard to tell, but there is a place to type there. Add a tag called "Ladder" for ladders and/or "Airlock" for airlocks. Name Layer 21 "Part Triggers". Apply the appropriate tag to the boxes you made, and add them to the Part Triggers layer. Unfortunately this is as far as I have gotten. I know nothing about animations, or how to get engines working properly. If this doesn't turn out to be an entirely useless wall of text I will try and update it with those things as I get to them. If someone wants to add in an explanation to help me along, that would be great. Oh, and in the part.cfg file. Note in Blender where you want attachment points to be. Apparently you can define them with empty Game Objects from Unity, but as far as I can tell that's not entirely functional yet, so it seems best to use the old way. I have however been using MODEL {} nodes to deal with rotation and scaling. (Shown in Part Tools 0.20 thread) Directory structure is also more simple than implied by many internet guides. Take a look in the Squad folder for an idea of how to organize things. You choose the menu in which parts appear in the game from the config file for each part, so directory structure is more about logical organization than anything else. You will likely want a top level folder next to Squad, with Parts and other folders similar to theirs, but from there it's really up to you. No need for a texture and mesh folder for each part folder though, all the game uses now is part.cfg, model.mu, and any materials that go with it. Also, if someone knows how I can more easily use the same material across multiple parts, and possibly even the same model at different scales, without having to duplicate the materials and mu files for each, that would be great, I haven't been able to get that working 100% yet.