[WIP][1.8.x] SSTULabs - Low Part Count Solutions (Orbiters, Landers, Lifters) - Dev Thread [11-18-18]

[tater]

^^i made that same suggestion at the github.

[Jimbodiah]

That doesn't count    mwuhahahaha....

 

And I see Mage added the brass/bronze/gold color options

[The-Doctor]

I'm joining in, new solar system, new life support mods, new everything

[DocRockwell]

What are the differences between the various solid rocket booster options?

[Akira_R]

Just a general FYI to any one running SSTU and Texture Replacer, if you are seeing funky texture and shading on any of the capsules add the line

keepLoaded = ^SSTU/

to your @Default.cfg

[Theysen]

4 hours ago, DocRockwell said:

What are the differences between the various solid rocket booster options?

AFAIK the looks are affected only, for same size and diameter. The deflect slider is to angle the nozzle and this affects the thrust, as well. Otherwise they are just modelled after real life booster variants. 

Make sure to play around with the thrust curves as well! (Gradient is awesome, makes the thrust towards the booster's end fart out and not abrupt like stock *shrug*)

[vossiewulf]

5 hours ago, DocRockwell said:

What are the differences between the various solid rocket booster options?

The ones that mean something are reflected in changing thrust and burn time numbers. Also setting positive gimbal angles the nozzles outward, giving up some thrust for rocket stability. There are some functional nose cone options in ones that are designed to be attached to something, otherwise just various aerodynamic options. Nozzle options purely aesthetic but been trying to convince Mage to make them mean something.

[Jimbodiah]

I think he means the SRB-A and other parts... One is for upper stages and will have fairings at the bottom as well as other nozzle options.

Or maybe he means the A/B/C/D types which have different section bands on the sides (the black stripes).

[Shadowmage]

15 hours ago, DocRockwell said:

What are the differences between the various solid rocket booster options?

As others have stated -- currently the differences are visual only.

The various geometries (nozzles / bodies) were modeled after different real-world boosters (SRM, GEM, others), but I didn't feel like it was worth it to differentiate the stats on them (read: would take a ton of effort for little useful impact except removing options).

In the near future there will be a part-config-option- to allow for the nozzles to vary the thrust (and potentially ISP?) -- however the default SSTU configs will probably not be using that feature.

 

 

In general development news:

After nearly finishing writing my own custom PBR shader for Unity (oh, what a headache, but good to learn), I've stumbled upon something that should allow me to use the regular Unity 5 'Standard' shader from within KSP.

Basically the standard shader 'fails' when it comes to KSP due to reflection probes not handling the strange rendering setup used by KSP (scaled space, scenery space, regular world/object space).  However, I just hit upon a feature that would let me define 'custom' reflection probes that would use pre-rendered cubemaps (either completely pre-rendered, or rendered from in-game) as their reflection source; saving me a ton of effort in rewriting shaders.  (NOTE:  Would have incompatibilities with any other mods that muck with ReflectionProbes -- but as I'm only aware of one other prototype mod that does such, it shouldn't be too much of a concern).

Hopefully I'll get a chance to experiment on this over the weekend -- lets see if we can get some nice looking parts in KSP finally.  Would still have to adapt the standard shader a bit in order to add the recoloring system support -- but that should be downright simple compared to writing up the lighting functions.

[DocRockwell]

Thanks for the info everyone!

[Shadowmage]

Got PBR shaders working -in- KSP (well, mostly; need to render the reflection-map(s), and do some code cleanup/optimizations).  Apparently KSP does not include all of the Standard shader variants (e.g. no normal map support), so I had to get creative.  This is a slightly modified version of the Unity Standard shader, with a few compiler macros thrown in to force-enable some of the features .  Yet to do is to add recoloring support, but that should be comparatively easy (after I figure out the reflections in-game).

 

This is using a pure-white skybox and reflection cube-map; with a (little) bit more work, it will look much better.  With a lot more work, it could look stellar.   The white 'highlights' you see on the edges/underside are from the white skybox and reflection map.

 

My thoughts for a 'quick-and-dirty' setup are to take a camera (in-game/rendering camera), position it at the vessels origin, and render the cubemap from there.  Use layer masks to only render specific features -- e.g. scenery and KSP skybox.  Update every few frames/seconds.  Then all of a sudden KSPs graphics got more visually appealing.

[Shadowmage]

Wow... I'm not sure what else can be said.

 

Except... more wow...

 

And one more time...

Simply jaw dropping.

(not sure what the white reflected rectangle is... but as stated... majorly WIP/prototype here)

So full of awesome.  And I haven't even fixed the reflected skybox yet (its still white).  Or done anything real with Substance Painter -- only slapped on some materials at their default settings.

[T-10a]

Wow, that's neat looking.

I'm not even sure how this can "blend in" with other mods anymore.

[vossiewulf]

Yep, that's a slight visual upgrade over what we have currently  Very nice job.

Default settings for substance materials are usually very good, if they don't look right there's something wrong with the scale of your model. That's where I was saying to flesh out the material library, because other than color you generally use them as is, only messing around with that which you're intended to, like thresholds for procedural materials. Or at least beyond that, I found messing with them to being heading down a rabbit hole from which I was unlikely to emerge.

Besides free, check out Paweł Łyczkowski's substance material offerings. I've used those constantly when working in SP.

For some reason can't add the link to his name, so have to paste it raw:  https://gumroad.com/plyczkowski

Edited October 14, 2017 by vossiewulf

[Theysen]

3 hours ago, T-10a said:

Wow, that's neat looking.

I'm not even sure how this can "blend in" with other mods anymore.

This just entered god tier. 

@Shadowmage Does this system already work in orbit? I can only imagine the looks of those parts on a station against a black background, thanks for taking a dated looking game to the next level. 

[gmiddlemass]

8 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

 

Simply jaw dropping.

There are no other words to describe it, this mod is truly in a different league to others now and I can't wait to see these effects in game.

Much as I'm looking forward to the "Making History" DLC I'm WAY more hyped about this mod and the work you are doing.

[tater]

6 hours ago, T-10a said:

Wow, that's neat looking.

I'm not even sure how this can "blend in" with other mods anymore.

There are other mods?

[Shadowmage]

Mirror-smooth tank at night, reflecting the galaxy and the KSC floodlight, and VAB on the far right:

Sunrise from orbit, showing the reflected sun/atmo on left, galaxy on right:  (atmo is a bit off...but working on it still)

And a dark-side shot, showing just galaxy reflections

 

As a majority of the rendering quality of the shader is due to the reflections, I figured I had better get those working well.  Currently trying to sort out how to properly setup the skybox (unity one, not KSPs), as that drives a lot of the back-end lighting calculations.  Still a big collection of code-side hacks to get these working, and the reflections aren't real-time yet, and still only include scenery.

Edit:  Fixed up the reflections.... (realtime, skyboxes, layering...still needs cleanup/optimizations)

Sunrise from orbit:

Kerbin reflected:

Edited October 14, 2017 by Shadowmage

[StickyScissors]

incredible! Wonder how all this reflection stuff will react to visual mods however... (skyboxes, clouds, scatterer)

Edited October 14, 2017 by StickyScissors

[tater]

Dang.

[T-10a]

I cannot wait to see this reflection texture to be applied to the Apollo capsules. Something like this:

http://cdn.gearpatrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Apollo-17-Redock-CSM-Gear-Patrol.jpg

Or this:

http://www.capcomespace.net/dossiers/espace_US/apollo/vaisseaux/command_service_module/CSM block2 A9.jpg

Edited October 15, 2017 by T-10a

[vossiewulf]

Looks like I happened to be at the right place at the right time to say the right thing  Really cool that you've taken that basic suggestion and turned it into this awesome implementation, as others have noted, with correct environment reflections and a few weeks to noodle around with the materials to exactly nail the surfaces you want to use, this is going to render everything else obsolete from a visuals standpoint. You might start thinking about how you could make this shader and texturing workflow available to other modders, it will be really cool when everyone upgrades to this level, think BDB's Atlas A with full mirror finish, slightly ripply-surface glossy-painted rocket bodies everywhere, materials being properly shiny or matte with correct specular levels depending on their real characteristics, it's a brave new Kerbal world  

P.S. Understand how much fun you're having but remember to sleep!

Edited October 15, 2017 by vossiewulf

[vossiewulf]

Oh BTW, once you're ready to deploy this should rename it SSTU PBR

 

[Jimbodiah]

Holy $h!t, Mage!!!  This looks absolutely amazing!!!!  SSTU version  xxx.145  "It's full of stars" edition.

 

Would it at some point be possible to add this to the recoloring GUI as an option?

Edited October 15, 2017 by Jimbodiah

[Shadowmage]

On 10/14/2017 at 12:17 AM, T-10a said:

Wow, that's neat looking.

I'm not even sure how this can "blend in" with other mods anymore.

A valid concern... but one that I can't do too much about.  My reasons for trying to move over to the PBR based setup are mostly due to time constraints regarding modeling -- if I'm going to continue to make new models and textures, I've got to find a faster way to do it.  Spending 20+ hours messing around in Gimp creating a single texture set for a model is simply too much; I can probably get that down to 4-5 hours per model using SP and PBR material setups (and that would be including multiple texture sets).

If I can get it all figured out and working well I'll see about releasing the shader setup as a stand-alone package that others can include in their mods'.  Nothing stopping them from having nice looking parts as well .

 

16 hours ago, StickyScissors said:

incredible! Wonder how all this reflection stuff will react to visual mods however... (skyboxes, clouds, scatterer)

So far... not very well. 

• EVE clouds cause black patches in the reflections, apparently they fully block the sunlight (can probably be solved, might require changes to EVE)
• Scatterer atmosphere (or is it ocean?) is rendered in every face of the cubemap, in some sort of camera-space positioning.  Again, should be solveable, but might require changes to scatterer.
• TextureReplacer (visor reflections) - should work fine, I've actually used their reflection code as a bit of a reference on how to do the KSP layered rendering.
• Skyboxes -- custom skyboxes should work fine.  As I'm using a camera rig to capture the reflection textures, it should capture those as well.

Scatterer cubemap export, showing... I'm not sure what its showing actually.  This is supposed to be a render of 'ScaledSpace' (planets when viewed from orbit).  Looks like it might be rendering part of an occlusion/depth texture (the white bits), the ocean (behind the white bits), and the scatterer atmosphere (the lower half of the img).

This is actually the next bit I'll be working on -- as visual mods are always in my 'playable' installs, they pretty much have to be supported.

 

13 hours ago, T-10a said:

I cannot wait to see this reflection texture to be applied to the Apollo capsules. Something like this:

http://cdn.gearpatrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Apollo-17-Redock-CSM-Gear-Patrol.jpg

Or this:

http://www.capcomespace.net/dossiers/espace_US/apollo/vaisseaux/command_service_module/CSM block2 A9.jpg

Yep, should be doable, and should give very authentic look to the parts.  Gotta get it all working and optimized first though (and decide if I'm actually going to go forward with the system).

 

29 minutes ago, Jimbodiah said:

Holy $h!t, Mage!!!  This looks absolutely amazing!!!!  SSTU version  xxx.145  "It's full of stars" edition.

 

Would it at some point be possible to add this to the recoloring GUI as an option?

It will more be a restructuring of the recolor system -- if I adopt a new PBR setup, the recoloring system will be reworked accordingly.  Thankfully the textures produced by this workflow should be easy to recolor (as the diffuse/albedo texture is mostly just color; most of the detail goes into the metal/smoothness maps); using the built-in color-tinting on the shader produces decent results from my little bit of testing.

• I have a bit of an idea on how to add 'lots' of recoloring channels per-part/section, rather than just 3. 
  • The # of channels is setup in the texture-set config file
  • Mask texture is single-channel (grayscale), with each discrete color value representing one recolor channel selection.
  • In order to pass this information to the shader, it is itself compiled into a texture that can be sampled by the shader and decoded during texture sampling.
  • This would allow for the more complex parts to allow per-detail recoloring, rather than randomly grouping the geometry together.
• Specular/shininess control would be removed.  Shininess would be adjusted by changing the texture set/material -- if you want metal, choose a metal material (other options would be paint, foam, foil, rough metal, etc).
• Textures/sets for nearly all models would have to be redone with the new PBR setup

 

One more glamour shot:

Now that is what silver tanks should look like