Tokamak Industries Refurbished Parts - Learning feedback thread

[Crocket]

1 hour ago, Tokamak said:

Description: I’ll eventually need to write something clever here.

Here's my idea for one.

After an engineer accidentally punctured the new fuel tank we were working on, he came up with the idea of just using it as a dry workshop: it would weigh less, plus it would be "more cooler than a dumb tank". He was promptly fired and our head engineer came up with the idea of converting it into a dry workshop! Plus, with the fired engineer's paycheck, we added a lounge area for your kerbonauts to relax in after a long day workshopping!

[Tokamak]

1 minute ago, Crocket said:

Here's my idea for one.

After an engineer accidentally punctured the new fuel tank we were working on, he came up with the idea of just using it as a dry workshop: it would weigh less, plus it would be "more cooler than a dumb tank". He was promptly fired and our head engineer came up with the idea of converting it into a dry workshop! Plus, with the fired engineer's paycheck, we added a lounge area for your kerbonauts to relax in after a long day workshopping!

Heh, cute.

[Tokamak]

If anyone is interested in playing with the part, here it is: https://github.com/maekern/Tokamak-Refurbished-Parts

 

I'd love to know how the IVA performs. The one downside of having gotten a nice gaming machine recently is I now can't tell how an older machine will handle the poly count. First world problems

Feedback on every aspect always welcome.

[Stone Blue]

@Tokamak I cant remember where I read it, or who told me, (and someone can surely please correct me if I'm wrong), but I got the impression it wasnt the best thing to import .blend files into Unity... The gist of what all i came across after much searching and reading, was to use .fbx, or .dae for Unity... And I cant remember which is which, but one is best to use if there are NO animations exported from Blender, and to use the other when there ARE animations done in Blender...

And I also end up with Unity (seemingly) randomly adding small rotations, and transform relocations to my imported files... Granted, they are usually 0 to 1.XXXXXX-eX ... ??? I just zero them out, or remove the added zeros, as determined by the -eX...

[Tokamak]

2 minutes ago, Stone Blue said:

@Tokamak I cant remember where I read it, or who told me, (and someone can surely please correct me if I'm wrong), but I got the impression it wasnt the best thing to import .blend files into Unity... The gist of what all i came across after much searching and reading, was to use .fbx, or .dae for Unity... And I cant remember which is which, but one is best to use if there are NO animations exported from Blender, and to use the other when there ARE animations done in Blender...

And I also end up with Unity (seemingly) randomly adding small rotations, and transform relocations to my imported files... Granted, they are usually 0 to 1.XXXXXX-eX ... ??? I just zero them out, or remove the added zeros, as determined by the -eX...

Yeah, I've encountered that last thing too. I can only assume it's floating point rounding errors, or something.

I'll poke around to see if I can confirm what you are saying, because I'd like to know specifics. Especially because I am going to end up having to do some animation stuff before too long too

[Stone Blue]

4 minutes ago, Tokamak said:

I can only assume it's floating point rounding errors, or something.

Probably... Sometimes its the same degree as the scale... ie like the issue you had with the rescale where your part shrank so it was invisible... If Unity rescales by 100x, or 1000x, then the small "adjustments" Unity makes, are sometimes also scaled by the same multiplier...

Yeah, MY animation importing fiascos are mostly because I'm working with existing, complicated models, and I dont have original source files... So I'm forced to work off importing .mu s into Blender, and hence, have to export the existing animations into Unity...

If I was starting from scratch on animations, I'd most likely be doing them in Unity... Although, they dont seem too hard to do in Blender, and I've heard the new method in Unity 5 is "difficult"... BUT, there seems to be issues with importing animations from Blender... Sooo... kind of a pick your poison kind of thing, I guess...

Edited August 18, 2016 by Stone Blue

[Randazzo]

The only reason you must export to FBX format is if you are importing an animation into Unity. For non-moving parts, the .blend file is fine. Personally I've always found it less of a hassle to animate in Blender and import that to Unity, but do whatever works for you and don't be swayed by what you're "supposed" to do.

Also, I can say with confidence that 98% of the issues I have had were a direct result of user error somewhere in the process. Sometimes the only solution is a lot of trial and error to figure out what you're screwing up.

3 hours ago, Tokamak said:

Drag related stats: ???

 Looks like I have MORE to learn. I have no idea about this, and welcome suggestions.

There's no reason I can see to mess with the drag cube stuff manually on this part. Let the game generate it and leave it at that. If you're referring to the:

    maximum_drag = 0.2
    minimum_drag = 0.2

I'm pretty sure you can just leave that as is.

 

I think you're doing marvelously and I'm rather enjoying living vicariously through you here, remembering how awesome it was figuring all this stuff out for the first time. I'll try not to fanboi too much.

 

Edited August 18, 2016 by Randazzo

[cxg2827]

3 hours ago, Randazzo said:

 

The only reason you must export to FBX format is if you are importing an animation into Unity.

I have been using the blender prefabs for animated parts no problem in Unity 5.2.4f1 ( setting the animation type to "Legacy" under "Rig")

Spoiler

 

[Tokamak]

So, everyone says I should be learning to hand-draw textures, so here is my first fumbling attempt. I'm partly colourblind, which makes it hard to tell how something will look to most people, but I'm at least trying to fumble my way through choosing colours that are not too garish, and giving them some texture. The texturing on this isn't great, but with some work it might be okay in the context of just a part that you won't be seeing TOO closely.

It is hard to know how high res to make textures. I don't want to eat up stupid amounts of memory with every part. For this test I created a 1024^2 texture, and made myself a nice  grid so I could try to have a relatively consistent texel density, with 2.5 metres corresponding to about 256 pixels.

Also, oh god AO baking makes things look SO much better.

 

Oops, I see a seam that needs to be fixed! XD

 

I drew a lot of inspiration for the greebling from reference pictures of actual ECLSS equipment, though obviously trying to keep the models simple. The tug of war between keeping model complexity down but also making things look decent is hard.

Reference photos were less helpful for the texturing, because grey, grey, and more grey isn't a very interesting colour scheme. 

As always, any feedback and criticism is welcome

 

Edit: I hand painted the textures on the greebles (misc pipes tanks and things) in the center of the part. I did NOT create the gold endcap texture. That is a CC licensed texture created by@udk_lethal_d0se and at no point was it my intention to present that part as my work. That was an oversight on my part, and any assets, even a snippet of texture, that are used in anything I release will be fully credited.

Edited August 27, 2016 by Tokamak

[Stone Blue]

I was recently given some texturing advice by a couple masters, who will remain un-named ( @akron & @CobaltWolf, & the rest of the Dev Hole group), that you should do the texturing in hi-res (like 4096 or at least 2048), and then shrink them to acceptable levels before final packaging (like 512, 1024, or 2048)... that way you sort of future proof the textures, and have nice high res versions...

Basically, you can always shrink high res textures and they will look good; but you CANT make a lo-res texture look good, when making it bigger...

[Tokamak]

2 minutes ago, Stone Blue said:

I was recently given some texturing advice by a couple masters, who will remain un-named ( @akron & @CobaltWolf, & the rest of the Dev Hole group), that you should do the texturing in hi-res (like 4096 or at least 2048), and then shrink them to acceptable levels before final packaging (like 512, 1024, or 2048)... that way you sort of future proof the textures, and have nice high res versions...

Basically, you can always shrink high res textures and they will look good; but you CANT make a lo-res texture look good, when making it bigger...

That is a good idea. Also if you have to move stuff around and resize things within the texture, you'll minimize artifacts.

[Bombaatu]

For a drawing tool, I highly recommend Autodesk Sketchbook. It has a *lot* of features and is very reasonably priced - subscription based at $4.99/month or $29.99/year.

https://www.sketchbook.com/?locale=en

[Tokamak]

19 minutes ago, Bombaatu said:

For a drawing tool, I highly recommend Autodesk Sketchbook. It has a *lot* of features and is very reasonably priced - subscription based at $4.99/month or $29.99/year.

https://www.sketchbook.com/?locale=en

I will check it out.

[Crocket]

2 hours ago, Tokamak said:

 

So, everyone says I should be learning to hand-draw textures, so here is my first fumbling attempt. I'm partly colourblind, which makes it hard to tell how something will look to most people, but I'm at least trying to fumble my way through choosing colours that are not too garish, and giving them some texture. The texturing on this isn't great, but with some work it might be okay in the context of just a part that you won't be seeing TOO closely.

It is hard to know how high res to make textures. I don't want to eat up stupid amounts of memory with every part. For this test I created a 1024^2 texture, and made myself a nice  grid so I could try to have a relatively consistent texel density, with 2.5 metres corresponding to about 256 pixels.

Also, oh god AO baking makes things look SO much better.

 

As a non-colorblind individual, I can say your textures look very nice, lots of colors that work well together. For curiosity's sake, what kind of colorblind are you?

[Tokamak]

3 minutes ago, Crocket said:

As a non-colorblind individual, I can say your textures look very nice, lots of colors that work well together. For curiosity's sake, what kind of colorblind are you?

Good to know. I'm trying.  I'm unsure if they are too bright and saturated.

 

I'm red-green colourblind, but only partially. I can tell a red stoplight from a green stoplight, but it is harder than normal. In Overwatch, I was ecstatic that they had an option to change the usual teammates = green / enemies = red scheme, because even when I can tell the difference, it is just slower and harder.  A lifetime of comparing with friends has taught me that it's not just as simple as a red and green being collapsed towards each other.... but that everything  looks DIFFERENT. Often I can tell similar colours apart that my friends can't. It's weird.

[Tokamak]

Playing with adding some decals for flavour, and working on the shading

 

 

 

Edited August 19, 2016 by Tokamak

[wasml]

Very nice - I wish my "fist fumbling attempts" looked half as good as yours - or even my ongoing attempts! The symbols/writing/dial really add to it.

[Van Disaster]

Other than those rather large blotches - unless they're meant to represent some sort of fibre lagging which doesn't sound a good idea in space - that's a great start. You're right that it might be a little oversaturated ( which is something we all do ) - load a screenshot into a paint package & play with the saturation just to see.

[Tokamak]

10 hours ago, Van Disaster said:

Other than those rather large blotches - unless they're meant to represent some sort of fibre lagging which doesn't sound a good idea in space - that's a great start. You're right that it might be a little oversaturated ( which is something we all do ) - load a screenshot into a paint package & play with the saturation just to see.

What do you mean by "fiber lagging"?

 

Good idea about loading a screenshot to play with overall colour. I hadn't thought of that

[Van Disaster]

33 minutes ago, Tokamak said:

What do you mean by "fiber lagging"?

Like the fibreglass stuff you get round a central heating boiler ( as an example ), just fibrous material used for insulation. The orange tank does look a little that way.

[Tokamak]

1 hour ago, Van Disaster said:

Like the fibreglass stuff you get round a central heating boiler ( as an example ), just fibrous material used for insulation. The orange tank does look a little that way.

Oh, I see. I hadn't thought of that. I was mostly just going on my gut about what looked neat. I'll think on that

[Tokamak]

I keep learning as I go, but I've realized that if I constantly go back and fix EVERYTHING, I'll never get anything done, so for now I'm charging forward.

One of the mods with parts I'm going to "refurbish" is porkjet's inflatable hab pack. The larger of the two already has a nice IVA, that is modeled after the larger style of Transhab. But the smaller one had only the bare start of an IVA, so I'm trying to finish it, in the style of the two other working porkjet hab back IVAs. As such I'm using some textures and whatnot from the others, obviously. Like the chairs, and the garden.

Since when @Porkjetoriginally made these, memory was more of a concern, he re-uses textures a lot. Which was the right thing to do. Since I'm trying to pretty it up, and we now have 64 bit, I'm expanding those out a bit and adding some baked on AO and shadows.

Here's my rough inspiration:

And here is what I have so far, after a couple of days of work

 

[Tokamak]

I seem to be establishing a workflow that is gradually starting to make sense. I'm trying to to large batches of one thing, when possible. So I'm doing more modelling, and now some texturing, but I'll wait until I have a few parts ready to go before I start with the unity and .cfg file side of things. And I still have animations to learn. XD

While it isn't really a refurb of an existing KSP part, I found myself charmed by this concept that I found in my quest for references

Specifically I like that while it is still a basic cylinder, it is meant to be a multipurpose part with mounting points for things like wheels if needed. Also I like how it is designed to allow things to be mounted on the FRONT, at least initially. It is a forward facing cockpit that doesn't have to start out at the front of the craft. I guess that idea just seems neat. If I'm going to make the design work, I'm going to need to also make a jettisonable shroud for the top part of the front ring. So that will be another thing to learn.

Texturing is hard. I'm going though @CaptainKipard's tutorials, which are super helpful, though translating from gimp to CS requires some work on my part. I think my damage layers may be still too high contrast, but I can always adjust that.

 

Obviously I need to pull out the side and cockpit windows, and texture them separately. Also, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make normal or bump maps. Even walkthroughs for my version of Photoshop CS direct me to menu options that are just not there.

I'll also need to learn to do light emission and shininess, to make the windows look right. Whee.

 

Anyway, feedback is as always welcome.

 

[Stone Blue]

@Tokamak Ummm...
 

 

http://imgur.com/a/7KLWc

 

But GREAT job on your own version...

 

Edited August 23, 2016 by Stone Blue

[Tokamak]

Aww poo. XD

 

Oh well, I may as well continue the exercise, because I'm learning a lot.

 

Edit: It doesn't look like that specific part is in the SDHI updated pack yet. 

Edited August 23, 2016 by Tokamak