Complete Beginner Modding Tutorial?

[Mat van Kerman]

I thought I'd start to dabble into the world of modding, but I'm a total newbie. I'm wondering what the best tutorials for complete beginners is? Up to date, preferably. I looked around quite a bit but I couldn't find a whole lot of info. I found this one  and this one, but I'm not sure how up to date those are. Any help is appreciated!

If this isn't the correct place to be posting this, just let me know.

Thanks!

Edited January 12, 2018 by Mat van Kerman

[selfish_meme]

I have recently started as well, there are many more qualified people, but from the stratospheric heights some times they forget to mention the simple things. I can get you to a cube in game with a texture, the rest will be up to you.

First get Blender, the latest version will do, the first thing you will want to do is change the units to Metric - KSP parts are metric

Spoiler

 

Delete everything in the scene other than the cube, make sure the cube is selected and Smart UV unwrap it, there are better ways but to start this is adequate

Spoiler

 

save the image file, you will need that file soon. Save the .blend file as well. You have now modeled your first part

Now get Unity3D (free is fine), you will need this exact version

https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases/5.4.0p4

Also download the KSP Part Tools from here and extract them

Copy your KSP game without any mods to a new directory (this will allow you to boot fast (you will do a lot of this) and test mods without interference from other mods)

Open unity and create your KSP 3D project, add the Text Mesh Pro free bundle from the asset store and then add the part tools

Make a directory in your project for your parts and copy the two files you made above in there (drag and drop is fine)

Create an Empty Game Object in your scene and drag the cube onto it, click on the cube and then drag the image file onto it

Add a Components  -> physics -> Mesh Collider and click the convex button in the inspector

No you need to click on Tools -> KSP Part Tools you need to go to the setup tab and set the path to your copied KSP GameData folder

Make sure the cube is selected and Add Component -  KSP - Part Tools

If you want, change the model name in the KSP PartTools component

You will need to create a new directory for your mod beneath KSP GameData and set that path in the component

Change the Texture format to png and click write

Copy a .cfg file from the stock parts and put it in your new folder, maybe one of the cube shaped parts

Change the name, make sure to get rid of anything that has #autoLOC in it, and just leave the text names, the mesh line must also point to your newly created part

Boot KSP and find you new part!

*will edit this as mistakes become obvious

**you will probably need to google a lot of the steps, also Blender Guru has a great series of tutorials to get you started in Blender 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 12, 2018 by selfish_meme

[Geonovast]

Watching this.  The mashup of tutorials online has only made my head hurt.

[selfish_meme]

4 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Watching this.  The mashup of tutorials online has only made my head hurt.

Tell me about it, it's so hard to find out just simple things

[Mat van Kerman]

1 hour ago, selfish_meme said:

I have recently started as well, there are many more qualified people, but from the stratospheric heights some times they forget to mention the simple things. I can get you to a cube in game with a texture, the rest will be up to you.

...

Wow! Thanks for all that. I actually had already installed that correct Unity version, but only after searching for 30 -45 minutes. So yes, I think there could be more (and up to date) information for beginner modders.

Your info should help me get started, thank you! I hope other people chime in here as well.

Edited January 12, 2018 by Mat van Kerman

[Benjamin Kerman]

If you would like to find out more about the programming aspects, check out the Plugin Help and Development subforum and read the basics of creating a plugin guide. Feel free to PM me or submit a question if you would like some more specific information!

[DoctorDavinci]

Before you do anything you first need to know what your mod is going to do ... All the tips, tricks and programming stuff you will be shown by various members of the community don't do anything for you if you don't have something in mind to do

The first step is finding a concept to build a mod off of and then doscovering how to make it work with code

[Mat van Kerman]

On 1/11/2018 at 9:47 PM, selfish_meme said:

I have recently started as well, there are many more qualified people, but from the stratospheric heights some times they forget to mention the simple things. I can get you to a cube in game with a texture, the rest will be up to you.

....

Thanks again for your tutorial, I got my first part into KSP. I mostly understand the basics now and should be able to get started. The attachment nodes were a little off at first, but I got it mostly sorted out. Do you have any resources/tutorials for assigning the nodes properly?

Here's a small imgur album of my first part, "The Astounding Cube".

Edited January 13, 2018 by Mat van Kerman

[selfish_meme]

4 hours ago, Mat van Kerman said:

Thanks again for your tutorial, I got my first part into KSP. I mostly understand the basics now and should be able to get started. The attachment nodes were a little off at first, but I got it mostly sorted out. Do you have any resources/tutorials for assigning the nodes properly?

Here's a small imgur album of my first part, "The Astounding Cube".

Congrats? I don't have a tutorial, I have seen lots of stuff mentioned all over, also the mk1 command pod has a lot of doco

[Mat van Kerman]

5 hours ago, selfish_meme said:

Congrats? I don't have a tutorial, I have seen lots of stuff mentioned all over, also the mk1 command pod has a lot of doco

Okay, thanks! I'll look around.

Edited January 13, 2018 by Mat van Kerman

[wasml]

A lot old stuff but other than the wheel info I think most of it is still relevant Mod Development Links Compilation.

[Mat van Kerman]

21 minutes ago, wasml said:

A lot old stuff but other than the wheel info I think most of it is still relevant Mod Development Links Compilation.

Thank you! 

Any idea where I can get some textures for my models?

[wasml]

If you follow that link - about 15% of the way down there's a section on texturing - Link to one of the relevant pages. discusses unwrapping and texturing. If you don't have Photoshop GIMP is a free and open source graphics editor. One note - the three things I can think of off the top of my head that have changed - Wheels and emissives have changed and I think dds is now the preferred texture format - I'm sure there's more but I can't think of it at the moment. - enjoy!

[selfish_meme]

22 hours ago, wasml said:

If you follow that link - about 15% of the way down there's a section on texturing - Link to one of the relevant pages. discusses unwrapping and texturing. If you don't have Photoshop GIMP is a free and open source graphics editor. One note - the three things I can think of off the top of my head that have changed - Wheels and emissives have changed and I think dds is now the preferred texture format - I'm sure there's more but I can't think of it at the moment. - enjoy!

png still works fine, you can convert the png to a dds later, there are some rotation things happening with ksp dds images so probably best to leave that till your optimisation pass

[Mat van Kerman]

1 hour ago, selfish_meme said:

png still works fine, you can convert the png to a dds later, there are some rotation things happening with ksp dds images so probably best to leave that till your optimisation pass

So what would the preferred way to convert from .png to .dds be then?

[selfish_meme]

1 hour ago, Mat van Kerman said:

So what would the preferred way to convert from .png to .dds be then?

Nvidia has some dds tools https://developer.nvidia.com/legacy-texture-tools

Also there is a GIMP dds and normal map plugins http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/normalmap-and-dds-plug-ins-updated-for-gimp-2.8

I am doing my texture painting in gimp, so I use the gimp plugins

Edited January 15, 2018 by selfish_meme

[Mat van Kerman]

28 minutes ago, selfish_meme said:

Nvidia has some dds tools https://developer.nvidia.com/legacy-texture-tools

Also there is a GIMP dds and normal map plugins http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/normalmap-and-dds-plug-ins-updated-for-gimp-2.8

I am doing my texture painting in gimp, so I use the gimp plugins

Thanks! Sorry for being such a newbie, but are normal/specular maps necessary in any way? And I read some stuff about having to add a separate collision mesh, although I think that was on an older tutorial, that's not still necessary, is it? One last thing, is there any preferred texture resolution, or is the default 1024x1024 fine?   

Edited January 15, 2018 by Mat van Kerman

[selfish_meme]

58 minutes ago, Mat van Kerman said:

Thanks! Sorry for being such a newbie, but are normal/specular maps necessary in any way? And I read some stuff about having to add a separate collision mesh, although I think that was on an older tutorial, that's not still necessary, is it? One last thing, is there any preferred texture resolution, or is the default 1024x1024 fine?   

Remember I am a newbie too!

normal maps can be used, but they are not necessary, it will make your part look better though, really if the texture is setup right and you include a normal map it should look pretty good.

In Unity there is a 255 polygon limit for convex mesh colliders (what KSP uses), I breached that the other day. What I did to fix it was to make a second mesh by using decimate on the original mesh until I had a low enough poly count. I added that second mesh to the first high poly mesh in unity (drag and drop) and then added the convex mesh collider to that second mesh instead of the first. It should be approximately the right size and shape, good enough for collisions and attaching parts anyway.

I have also heard of people adding low poly meshes and low quality textures to a model as well as the higher quality stuff, maybe you can switch to that when you are further away, that's to learn for another day.

It's up to you, the bigger the texture is the more detailed it can be, but it also sucks up more memory

 

[Mat van Kerman]

31 minutes ago, selfish_meme said:

Remember I am a newbie too!

normal maps can be used, but they are not necessary, it will make your part look better though, really if the texture is setup right and you include a normal map it should look pretty good.

In Unity there is a 255 polygon limit for convex mesh colliders (what KSP uses), I breached that the other day. What I did to fix it was to make a second mesh by using decimate on the original mesh until I had a low enough poly count. I added that second mesh to the first high poly mesh in unity (drag and drop) and then added the convex mesh collider to that second mesh instead of the first. It should be approximately the right size and shape, good enough for collisions and attaching parts anyway.

I have also heard of people adding low poly meshes and low quality textures to a model as well as the higher quality stuff, maybe you can switch to that when you are further away, that's to learn for another day.

It's up to you, the bigger the texture is the more detailed it can be, but it also sucks up more memory

 

Haha! Okay, thanks for all the info, it helps a lot.

[EricPoehlsen]

Getting into KSP modding is not particulary easy the API documentation is pretty thin and some of the texts and video tutorials are not really up to date.

What definitly is helpful is looking into other peoples code on GitHub.

[promacuser]

On 1/11/2018 at 10:47 PM, selfish_meme said:

Now get Unity3D (free is fine), you will need this exact version

https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases/5.4.0p4

Is there any way to use a different version? This one does not work with the latest version of MacOS, High Sierra.

[wasml]

Unity 2017.1.3p1 is the version you need for plugins for KSP 1.6.X and (I think) 1.5.X. If your doing parts without an accompanying plug in you don't need the same Unity version as KSP uses.