Trying to create a part. I have made a model in Blender, and installed Part Tools in Unity. Confused about next steps.

[septemberWaves]

As the title states, I have made a model for a part in Blender and installed Part Tools in Unity. The Blender model also includes two single arrow objects for the attach nodes, and a collider model. It is not currently textured because it did not save the texture I painted properly, but I now know how to fix that once I remake the texture.

I cannot find any useful information for the next steps of the process. There are a lot of resources floating around, but many are out of date or consist of broken forum links, and the sheer number of irrelevant, outdated, or otherwise useless information is making it impossible to find any documentation that actually makes any sense. The closest thing I can find is Beale's tutorial here, but the utility breaks down at the transition to Unity since the tutorial model was not created in Blender, and what I actually have from Blender is too different from the results of that Wings 3D process for me to get any sense out of it.

Could someone please direct me to any resource that is at least somewhat up to date that explains how to take a model made in Blender, put it into Unity, and subsequently make it a functional part in KSP?

Edited April 1, 2021 by septemberWaves

[wasml]

Unfortunately the information is scattered - going from memory (its been awhile so don't take these as definitive - I may have forgotten some steps)

1) Export you model from blender - I think dae (may require enabling a plugin) or fbx are typical or just use the .blend file directly from blender. Things to watch for - fbx my scale your model by 100 (forget if it's bigger or smaller) unless you find the setting to change it and the blender export will as far as I know give you everything - I like to have a number of related models in one file so this doesn't work well for me.

2) import into Unity - I just drag and drop the exported file into the Unity assets pane.

3) Add an empty GameObject (you may want to rename) to your Unity project and when you select it the inspector pane should should see a "Add Component". Click this select KSP then parttools. This adds the parttools to the root object.

4) drag and drop the model onto this GameObject.

5) Open up the tree under the GameObject and select your collider(s) - in the inspector pane "Add Component | Physics | mesh collider" or add one or more Box, Capsule or Sphere colliders - these primitives are less expensive computationally. After you have the colliders setup you can remove the mesh filter and mesh renderer.

6) Select you meshes and add the textures. I make my textures in Gimp and export both a DDS and a png. Drag and drop the .png's into the Unity asset folder and the drag and drop a texture on each of the meshes.

7) Select the top GameObject from step three and you should see a parttools section in the inspector fill in a name and click "write" - at some point your ask to select a directory - maybe when setting up parttools?. You should now have a .mu file in your chosen directory - after you've finished tweaking the part you will want to replace the texture Unity spits out with the DDS you created earlier.

8) Setup your config file and you might have a working part in KSP - typo's in the config or any number of other things can prevent the part from showing up in KSP - in which case you look in the log and try to puzzle out what went wrong.

Some random thoughts: If the part shows up in game but once you place the part you can't grab it again - you probably forgot or miss configured the collider(s). Small typo's in the config can cause the part not to load - sometimes case maters - sometimes not. Animations have some extra steps I haven't covered here.

Good luck and happy modding!