Beginners Part Modding Tutorial

[JP_Magoo]

I need help! When I try loading my engine and collider OBJ with my texture, the materials folder does not appear.

https://imgur.com/a/0ylIP

[IceTitan]

For tutorial 2 - Step 15 (UV mapping) : In the latest version of wings3d 64b i cant find "show/hide background image"

can someone help me with that?

Edited April 12, 2018 by IceTitan
Found it

[Fengist]

So, why hasn't this been made a sticky????

[naked singularity]

Thank you for posting this thread.  As someone who has not written any mods at all I appreciate any resources I can find to get started.  

In the mod Dr. Jet's Chop Shop there's a part called Lil' Buzzer.    It consumes electric power to produce thrust, and I'd like to copy it a few times a few times with some tweaks.  Here are some examples:

 

https://hobbyking.com/en_us/edf30-with-9000kv-motor-assembled.html

 

https://hobbyking.com/en_us/dr-mad-thrust-90mm-12-blade-alloy-edf-1250kv-3700w-8s-counter-rotating.html

 

For me, the only interesting difference between these parts is their performance, ie one weighs 9.5g, draws 33.6W and produces 48g thrust while the other weighs 615g, draws 3700W and produces 4.5kg thrust.  I don't really care much about their appearance.  Could I jump straight to editing .cfg files?  

 

 

[CobaltWolf]

22 hours ago, naked singularity said:

Thank you for posting this thread.  As someone who has not written any mods at all I appreciate any resources I can find to get started.  

In the mod Dr. Jet's Chop Shop there's a part called Lil' Buzzer.    It consumes electric power to produce thrust, and I'd like to copy it a few times a few times with some tweaks.  Here are some examples:

https://hobbyking.com/en_us/edf30-with-9000kv-motor-assembled.html

https://hobbyking.com/en_us/dr-mad-thrust-90mm-12-blade-alloy-edf-1250kv-3700w-8s-counter-rotating.html

For me, the only interesting difference between these parts is their performance, ie one weighs 9.5g, draws 33.6W and produces 48g thrust while the other weighs 615g, draws 3700W and produces 4.5kg thrust.  I don't really care much about their appearance.  Could I jump straight to editing .cfg files? 

Yep you should be able to. Make sure to give the parts different internal names at the top of the cfg, so the game knows they are separate.

[TimKerbin]

Does anyone know if the latest free version of Unity, Unity Personal, has writing disabled? All I want to do is create a 2.5 m nose cone; it's all there in loaded in Unity ready to go, including collision mesh, texturing, materials. I followed this tutorial to the best of my ability, including others. Except, after installing the KSP Part Tools there is NO "set data directory" option or "write" option for my object (these options appear in every tutorial...except when I'm actually using Unity!). Either I am doing something wrong or the damn thing won't allow me to write the object; there's no other way to export what I have created. This is so damn frustrating!

What version of unity was this tutorial written for? A paid unlimited version? The Unity site just says "limitations apply" regarding Unity Personal, but doesn't say what they are. Limitations indeed.

[LukeSky1112]

Thanks @Beale!

[Outsoldier]

neverminde sorry I fixed it

Edited June 16, 2020 by Outsoldier
mistakes

[Outsoldier]

Sorry about the other reply but how do I make a fuel tank? @Beale

[Beale]

2 hours ago, Outsoldier said:

Sorry about the other reply but how do I make a fuel tank? @Beale

Same process, just model a cylinder instead of the nozzle shape.

[Outsoldier]

8 hours ago, Beale said:

Same process, just model a cylinder instead of the nozzle shape.

Thanks! but what about the collider

[VoidCosmos]

So @Beale, how do you use unity 2019? Are the steps the same or something different?

[AlphaMensae]

On 6/16/2020 at 12:29 PM, Outsoldier said:

Thanks! but what about the collider

Just make a cylinder of the same size but with less faces, and export it as the mesh to use for a mesh collider in Unity.

A basic fuel tank is indeed just a cylinder, but you can make it fancier by adding domes at the top and bottom (slice a sphere into two halves). Make it even fancier by insetting the top and bottom faces of the cylinder, extrude them inward a bit to make the tank walls visible, and place the domes inside the walls like real rocket stages.

[Outsoldier]

2 minutes ago, AlphaMensae said:

Just make a cylinder of the same size but with less faces, and export it as the mesh to use for a mesh collider in Unity.

A basic fuel tank is indeed just a cylinder, but you can make it fancier by adding domes at the top and bottom (slice a sphere into two halves). Make it even fancier by insetting the top and bottom faces of the cylinder, extrude them inward a bit to make the tank walls visible, and place the domes inside the walls like real rocket stages.

Oh I already figured it out so sorry for wasting your time.  But I will keep the idea of how to make it fancier and will add that to my next fuel tank!

[AlphaMensae]

On 6/18/2020 at 11:39 AM, VoidCosmos said:

So @Beale, how do you use unity 2019? Are the steps the same or something different?

Should be the same, just install PartTools. For quite a while now (probably not long after Beale created this tutorial) PartTools installatiom has been simpler, it's just a single asset package that you import into Unity.

Of course, there is no real reason to use Unity 2019 for making KSP parts, unless you want to use the new particle system and/or shaders.  Me, I'm still using Unity 5.4.0, as I have zero reason to use newer versions.  

[AverageUser54]

On 6/19/2020 at 7:55 PM, AlphaMensae said:

Should be the same, just install PartTools. For quite a while now (probably not long after Beale created this tutorial) PartTools installatiom has been simpler, it's just a single asset package that you import into Unity.

Of course, there is no real reason to use Unity 2019 for making KSP parts, unless you want to use the new particle system and/or shaders.  Me, I'm still using Unity 5.4.0, as I have zero reason to use newer versions.  

Really? I thought the new part tools required unity 2019.2.2f1

[Beetlecat]

Okay this was pretty fun to do. With all the tinkering with cfgs and such I've done, I've never actually "built" a part from scratch.

While attempting to follow this tutorial I got hung up a little by the slightly-newer version of unity I was running (2019.2.2f1) but probably mostly due to Part Tools 1.10. Downgrading to 1.9 allowed me to actually complete the unity portion and export the part itself.

 

Edited November 27, 2020 by Beetlecat

[CFYL]

Hey ther @Beale. I followed your tutorial step by step until I came across a problem. Unity says that it failed to compile all KSP shaders except the particle shaders. I can only find it in the "failed to compile" row. And, I found out that the part is transparent after I tested the mu file in KSP. That's something I didn't expect. Do you know what situation am I experiencing?

[Beale]

2 hours ago, AllenLi said:

Hey ther @Beale. I followed your tutorial step by step until I came across a problem. Unity says that it failed to compile all KSP shaders except the particle shaders. I can only find it in the "failed to compile" row. And, I found out that the part is transparent after I tested the mu file in KSP. That's something I didn't expect. Do you know what situation am I experiencing?

Hey, nice result on the engine I can see in the preview

Unfortunately I think this is more a part tools problem. Are you using the most up to date version of Part Tools and Unity (specifically 2019.2.2f1) from this post?

I wrote this tutorial a few years ago now, so the Unity / part tools bit is a little out of date (It's much easier to install these days).

[CFYL]

Thanks for the help!I did install Unity 2019.2.2f1 and KSP part tools from that post. But looking at it again, I just noticed there were some errors reported on the Unity console. I guess I'll re-install the part tools (or even Unity) to check if errors persisted. Maybe it's the TMP I'm using that broke part tools. (Now that all other modders are using Unity so smoothly, it must be my problem.)

Edited February 9, 2021 by AllenLi