Modding textures...

[K3RBAL KOL4]

KSP world...

Been trying to mod textures, specifically fuel tanks. I have found some tutorials that deal with .mbm, .pbm, .png, blah blah blah... I cannot get anything to open up properly in PS. I have PS CS4 64-bit. The closest I have come to getting a real editable image was a greyscale image that was out of proportion and had a blank line every other line.

Is it because I'm running 64-bit PS?

Is there a more direct option? idk why Squad makes this type of edit so ridiculously complicated and unpredictable.

I have followed every step, done all the math and still nothing will open up properly. I just want to edit a plain boring fuel tank texture... is it really this hard?

[sumghai]

[MOD - Moved to Modelling and Texturing Discussion subforums, as this is the appropriate place to be asking this sort of question]

The MBM (Mu Bit Map) is a proprietary texture format developed by SQUAD specifically for KSP, so no version of Photoshop will ever be able to directly open and edit it. It's an holdover from the earliest days of KSP's development, when SQUAD (at the time) didn't expect people to make add-ons for the game, hence the apparently non-intuitive file format.

That being said, it is possible to convert MBMs to the more readily-editable PNGs:

- Download and install Blender

- Download and install taniwha's Blender .mu import/export addon

- Import the fuel tank .MU model into Blender using the addon

- In the Blender's UV/Image Editor pane, you should be able to access all the textures used by the part, and individually save them to PNG format for editing

If you want to convert the PNGs back to MBMs, you will need to follow a more complicated process involving the Unity editor and the KSP PartTools package, but thankfully, the latest versions of the game can also directly load PNG textures for parts

Also, KSP 1.0 will soon switch to using DDS textures for parts - while DDS is also a proprietary standard, at least there are more texture converters available for it than for MBM.

[Van Disaster]

PS will open ( and write ) DDS directly if the nvidia plugins are installed. There are some utils around to convert from MBM to other things ( I'd pick tga if you can, opening transparent PNGs in PS is a bit unnecessarily annoying unless you script it ) but off the top of my head I can't remember where.

[CaptainKipard]

but thankfully, the latest versions of the game can also directly load PNG textures for parts

Has the "white texture" bug been resolved?