How do you showcase your parts?

[Sharpy]

Most part packs are featured with nice screenshots of the parts against a neutral background, well lit and quite 'appealing'.

How do you do this? Render them in Blender? Some mod for showcasing the parts? Screenshots and photoshop?

[liquidhype]

They are mostly renders from whatever 3D-modeling software one is using. Some people will spend a lot of time setting up the renders with perfect lighting, custom shaders for their materials and so on (which I like), others just hit a "quick render" button and calls it a day, both OK. 

It is not hard to do. Apply the textures to your models, make sure they are lit up well, position a camera at a flattering angle and hit "Render". Most 3D-modeling software have an internal render engine, but there are also standalone render engines one can use. It all depends on how "flashy" you want you images to appear. You can always use PS or GIMP on the rendered images if you want to add text or whatever after the fact. But text and so on can of course also easily be added in the 3D-modeling software. There are hundreds of ways to accomplish the same thing.

[Sharpy]

2 minutes ago, liquidhype said:

They are mostly renders from whatever 3D-modeling software one is using. Some people will spend a lot of time setting up the renders with perfect lighting, custom shaders for their materials and so on (which I like), others just hit a "quick render" button and calls it a day, both OK. 

It is not hard to do. Apply the textures to your models, make sure they are lit up well, position a camera at a flattering angle and hit "Render". Most 3D-modeling software have an internal render engine, but there are also standalone render engines one can use. It all depends on how "flashy" you want you images to appear. You can always use PS or GIMP on the rendered images if you want to add text or whatever after the fact. But text and so on can of course also easily be added in the 3D-modeling software. There are hundreds of ways to accomplish the same thing.

One problem I see, these are not KSP shaders, so it's a bit like the McDonald food photos: if you ever took a bite of one of the sandwiches that are presented in the photos you'd die in agony from all the chemicals, wire support, fake ingredients etc used to look as appetizing. That wonderful whiff of steam above a coffee cup? Sulphuric acid plus ammonia. You apply the actual shaders in Unity, and only in KSP they are finally rendered.

[liquidhype]

1 minute ago, Sharpy said:

One problem I see, these are not KSP shaders, so it's a bit like the McDonald food photos: if you ever took a bite of one of the sandwiches that are presented in the photos you'd die in agony from all the chemicals, wire support, fake ingredients etc used to look as appetizing. That wonderful whiff of steam above a coffee cup? Sulphuric acid plus ammonia. You apply the actual shaders in Unity, and only in KSP they are finally rendered.

That is not a problem, it is a good thing. The standard KSP shaders are absolutely horrid and no serious 3D artist would ever use them to display their work, even if it is to showcase the models as a mod for the game. Unless the images of the parts you see on this forum are screenshotted directly from the game, or from Unity with the KSP shaders applied, all the parts are being showcased with peoples own custom material shaders applied to them.

It is a given and obvious that the parts you see in the images plastered in most mod threads on here are not going to look exactly like that in the game. It is not the same as McDonalds or whoever else manipulating their images to make their products look more appealing to their customers.

This has never been an issue in the past (as most poeple understand how it is done), so I don't see why you would categorize it as a problem.

[Shadowmage]

One option that I've seen used for some of the albums -- Koronal Vessel Viewer.  ( https://github.com/bigorangemachine/ksp-kronalutils )  (Not sure if it has been updated for KSP 1.2...)

As it uses the in-game shaders (mostly), what you see is what you get.  Though, setting up the render for it was... painful... last I played with it.

For my models -- I set up the materials in blender with diffuse, normal, and specular textures, all using the standard blender render (not cycles), and they come out looking very close to what shows up in KSP.  You can even disable some of the advanced rendering features for a more KSP-esque look (e.g. disabling render-time AO, as KSP does not use real-time AO).

The one place I haven't been able to get decent renders out of blender are for emissive materials -- something about the way Unity does them completely changes the look from anything that I can get blender to do using the standard internal renderer.

[Skalou]

the best  and easiest for me is to use in-game  picture, this is what i would like when i'm looking at a mod