First part in blender

[Navy4422]

So I decided that I might try my hand at modeling and need a little bit of help on where to go from here, Hopefully it looks like an engine.

I have the model done and I think UV mapping is done

And here is the UV Map-I will use paint.net or gimp to texture

Edited August 27, 2012 by Navy4422

[wildkittyv1]

Cool stuff with the model, but you're probably going to want to consider redoing the UV Map to make it easier on yourself.

I was having a bit of difficulty working with it, so I can give a few tips.

First, thanks to Nutt I learned that you can individually map parts and grab them/move them around at your leisure. You will want to do this with the cylinder projection option when you highlight what you want to map and hit U for the uv map options. On the left toolbar there is a pull down menu labled Direction - choose align with image as the mode and it should flatten the cylinders out you chose to map. Grab those maps on the UV map window and move them around like you do with the object window and proceed onto the next part.

Cylinder projection will basically take all the faces of the part(s) you've selected and flatten them out for you, and Align with Image will straighten them so they're rectangles instead of oddly shaped blobs. Do this with the different sections of your engine body and line them up vertically so when you're texturing you can smoothly transition from one to the next. Use faces as your selection mode and alt click the ring you want to map. If you get a vertical strip, move the cursor closer to one of the vertical edges of that particular face and it should select the ring instead.

Also, use seams. Seams are ways that the program breaks down complex objects and decides where to cut when uv mapping and functions as you'd expect, much like a zipper. Those circular parts that breach the top plate cylinder would be good candidates for this. It looks like you used rotated cylinders for this instead of manipulating a normal one to make it curve. That's fine, I guess, and I'm going to assume that those parts are complete rings that join somewhere inside the model. Highlight the edge that bisects the rings vertically and on the toolbar you can click "Mark as Seam" on the toolbar, and it will change it to a red line; do the same for the bisecting line on the interior of the rings. The edge will still function if you want to manipulate it, so no worries.

Now, you should probably mark that first edge that you can see on your rings where they protrude from the engine body. Mark it as a seam so it should be a circle selection, that's the edge I mean.

Now when you map those parts, it will cut along the bisecting seam to split each ring into two parts, and then the last seam you chose will allow those parts to be mapped flatly instead of in rings like you have. This will make texturing them a whole hell of a lot easier.

Remember that you can move all of the stuff around in the UV map window like you do with the object window, so place things where you know what they are and don't have to reference the model too much. After you've mapped everything, select all in the object window and you'll see all the different projections show up on the UV map as you did them, instead of allowing the program to do it for you and not necessarily getting it right. This makes for a much more organized UV map and it's a billion times easier to work with than just letting the program do it for more complex shapes.

Hope it helps, good work, and good luck. I'm just getting into part modeling too and I know it can seem overwhelming at first, but it's a good feeling to see that first part come together.

Edit: I took two screenshots of what the difference is when you do the individual mapping versus letting the program do something like smart uv mapping or just using seams yourself. The big key is the cylinder projection option and aligning to model, then just moving stuff around and all that jazz.

Smart UV Unwrap with a few seams:

Manually using Cylinder Projection for each section and using seams:

You can see a huge difference in how easy it would be to work with and just avoiding headaches. Hope I helped.

Edited August 27, 2012 by wildkittyv1
Added spoiler tags

[Navy4422]

Thank you so much I will try to work on that. I did do a basic texture on the UV I posted and it was awful trying to figure out what was what.

What else do I need to do to apply the texture, add the nodes, and collider to the parts? I went through the tutorial but I had issues understanding exactly what to do.

[wildkittyv1]

I'm not entirely sure myself on adding the collision mesh and what needs to be done afterwards, but I'm taking it step by step and just working on some modeling and textures for the time being. I also looked at the tutorial and it doesn't explain it very well, and it's also quite old and I ended up trying to learn it all from scratch. It really ought to be unstickied and updated to be more thorough and explanatory as well as being accurate.

The nodes you have to do in the part.cfg, but you can derive those numbers from the model since KSP uses the same scale as blender as far as I've interpreted. Hopefully someone with some experience can chime in and give us some help since we both seem to be in the same place. There's another guy on reddit that's asking the same question and I unfortunately can't give him an answer either.

I'll let you know if I get it figured out.

[Tommygun]

I'm was wondering if this engine will be shorter than the others?

The current ones are so long that it is difficult to use them as landing engines and have landing gear long enough for them.

Ideally I think we need three short engines with 50, 75 and 150 units of thrust.

Well just suggestions, hope you don't mind.

Looking forward to seeing these.

[Navy4422]

Yeah I'd gladly make more but I dont know where to go from where I am, else I would make some short ones

[Tiberion]

The node_collider is a separate Object in the same .blend file or DAE file. Hitting tab goes from object to edit mode, and when in object mode, if you go to Add, Mesh, Cylinder, you'll get a 2nd object in the shape of a cylinder (if you add it in edit mode, it adds a separate, unconnected mesh to your main object (the one that represents the visual portion of your model)

Rigth after you add the 2nd object, there will be a new options menu on the left side (below all of the editing functions like duplicate, unwrap, etc) that lets you set the cylinder parameters like radius, height, and number of "sides" on the barrel. For a 1m engine, you need a radius of 0.5, and from the tutorial we know that cylinders should have 24 sides. You can set a height if you have a specific length in mind, or ignore it. Then once you click in the main area, the parameters are "set" for your cylinder.

Now the idea is to make your engine "fit" this cylinder so that it sort of describes its top, bottom, and sides. You'd use the scale functions to do that (right click to re-select the engine object, then go to edit mode, hit S to scale. You can lock in an axis after hitting S to only scale one axis (so hitting S, then Z would lock it into Z axis mode and you only scale the models height. Or you can hit S then shift+Z to lock out Z and leave the height unaffected while you scale.

Once you have that done and you are satisfied with your UVMap, its time to finalize the model setup and export it. How you do that depends on which method of adding parts you are using; the 'old style' of using DAE and PNG files, or the new style of importing your model and img into unity and setting it up in there. In any event you need to add materials, set the object names properly, and set up smoothing on the model (so the engine bell doesn't have "faces" but appears round, there are topics about that in this forum somewhere)

but take it one step at a time, and come back and ask questions about steps you don't understand. Its also useful to import some old DAE files to look at how they are set up (try to find some made in Blender, as importing models from other software can do some weird things and its hard to understand) - A lot of the newer engines I added to NP would work for that purpose.

[Navy4422]

Thanks Tiberion, I'll get back to work once school calms down

[tjitte]

that looks good!! i would lofe to see that whit a texture

i usualy unwrap the uv map manualy, just by marking the seam, gives me the best result