A guide to making Deploying Landing Gears

[blackheart612]

As I'm studying landing gears for AirplanePlus, I dug through piles of pieces of information in the forums and searching through KSP coding through google as well because of the lack of proper documentary for it. Here's a concise visual and textual guide to the compilation of my knowledge, hopefully made easier than longer texts and covering almost everything needed to make basic deploying landing gears

What you need:

-Have a 3D Modeling Software
-Create the model
-Make sure it has proper model hierarchy

Put it in Unity and here are the pictures:

We will use two models from my mod. It might seem cluttered but the important colors are pink and yellow.

Do not be confused by the different global orientations of the two models.
It only suggests that it will determine which is front in KSP but the wheel will have different front than the global.

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Once exported, part configs come next:

That's basically gist of the landing gears. Here's for the mirroring of the assymetric parts:

Note that mirrored parts ALSO mirror FXModuleLookAtConstraint and lights making it impossible to have proper Drag Braces and Lights on Asymmetric Landing Gears.
And I spelled Asymmetric wrong in my mod. I can't believe this.

So what are you waiting for, download my mod now make your own landing gear now!

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If I missed anything, or you need to know anything, don't be afraid to ask. I only included the basics, mostly.

 

Step by step tutorial for landing leg:

 

Edited March 28, 2018 by blackheart612

[EmbersArc]

Thanks for taking the time to make this!

Some additions:

targetPosition is the position on the suspension where it will settle if no forces are applied. Usually 1.0 for landing gear and 0.5 for wheels.

TsubSys is the point in the animation where the wheelCollider takes over. 0 for beginning and 1 for end.

useStandInCollider uses the wheelCollider as a standard collider for the wheel when it is retracted

 

I'm having a small problem with my wheels. They all spin backwards (only visually). Have you encountered this problem before? I'm pretty sure all the relevant parts are rotated correctly.

[blackheart612]

@EmbersArc thanks for the additions. Regarding the wheels spinning backwards, I'm sure the axis for spinning is determined by the reference but I'm not sure about the direction of the spin. Of course, you can always make sure that the reference points forward (blue is front). But also try orienting your wheel mesh properly as well as make sure the whole hierarchy of the model has no negative scales or... anything that might break things because landing gear set ups are fragile in unity.

[EmbersArc]

I had to apply the rotation of all objects in Blender (Ctrl-A -> Apply Rotation). Don't know which one in particular was wrong but it works now.

                           

Here's a rough description of my setup for the the SpaceX landing legs, thought I'd link that here.