[WIP] RestockPBR - A PBR and recolorable conversion for Restock/Restock+

[Nertea]

Something I've been working on for a little while. With the advent of Deferred which makes major improvements to the overall lighting quality of KSP, the framework around using shader that use paramaetrically based rendering (PBR) has gotten a lot more relevant, so after some significant prototyping and testing I've decided to commit to a complete rework of Restock/Restock+ to use PBR shaders. For the layperson, that means more realistic lighting and materials parts, including reflective metals, better foils, translucent solar panels, etc. Here's a few randomly selected examples:

This video is a nice example of some of the dynamicism on display, and here's a vignette of what things look like in different lighting environments

This is an incredible amount of work so of course we need to add more. One thing that's currently missing from KSP1 is a unified, coherent part recolor system that has a passable UX. So with the help of a few people such as @Beale and @Al2Me6 I've been extending the Resurfaced mod to include a custom recoloring solution. This is my own personalized vision of how recolorability should work in KSP so is pretty dialled in to what I want. Effectively, RestockPBR will not only include reworked part art, but will also include a full-fledged team color implementation.

Here's a few videos of how this works:

• The basics
• More basics
• Multiple material recolor zones with variants
• With tweakscale there's some amazing customizability of parts

A couple core notes

• Often this will be replacing various Part Variants with recolorable zones. This means that perfect seamless compatibility with base Restock and stock will not be as good as restock. Some of your selected Part Variants will reset to defaults
• The QA level on this project is lower because it's just me :P. 
• Work is slow. There's hundreds of parts and textures to convert. I'm up to 240 so far.
• This will probably include updates to parts Restock doesn't cover, notably aircraft parts. 

There are currently no official downloads, but they will probably come in alpha form soon, once I pass a certain part completion threshold. 

[JonnyOThan]

Oh heck yes.

[SofieBrink]

This is awesome, can’t wait to play around with it!

[缪zy]

wow

[缪zy]

6 hours ago, Nertea said:

Something I've been working on for a little while. With the advent of Deferred which makes major improvements to the overall lighting quality of KSP, the framework around using shader that use paramaetrically based rendering (PBR) has gotten a lot more relevant, so after some significant prototyping and testing I've decided to commit to a complete rework of Restock/Restock+ to use PBR shaders. For the layperson, that means more realistic lighting and materials parts, including reflective metals, better foils, translucent solar panels, etc. Here's a few randomly selected examples:

This video is a nice example of some of the dynamicism on display, and here's a vignette of what things look like in different lighting environments

This is an incredible amount of work so of course we need to add more. One thing that's currently missing from KSP1 is a unified, coherent part recolor system that has a passable UX. So with the help of a few people such as @Beale and @Al2Me6 I've been extending the Resurfaced mod to include a custom recoloring solution. This is my own personalized vision of how recolorability should work in KSP so is pretty dialled in to what I want. Effectively, RestockPBR will not only include reworked part art, but will also include a full-fledged team color implementation.

Here's a few videos of how this works:

• The basics
• More basics
• Multiple material recolor zones with variants
• With tweakscale there's some amazing customizability of parts

A couple core notes

• Often this will be replacing various Part Variants with recolorable zones. This means that perfect seamless compatibility with base Restock and stock will not be as good as restock. Some of your selected Part Variants will reset to defaults
• The QA level on this project is lower because it's just me :P. 
• Work is slow. There's hundreds of parts and textures to convert. I'm up to 240 so far.
• This will probably include updates to parts Restock doesn't cover, notably aircraft parts. 

There are currently no official downloads, but they will probably come in alpha form soon, once I pass a certain part completion threshold. 

Will this mod conflict to shaddy and TURD？

Edited yesterday at 12:28 AM by 缪zy

[Nertea]

Yes. 

[Spartwo]

Looks great! Bit frustrating from the perspective of a 70% complete restock TURD pack.

Will be an awful shame if the final product has no hex/rgb/hsv selection, feel a lack of that will be a step backwards if anything.

[Halban]

Hey Nertea. I'm sorry to be reactionary but have you tried out Lazy Painter? It's not integrated into the stock UI like your own system, but when I made it I believed the UX to be really strong. That was the point of making it for me. I'd be genuinely grateful to hear feedback on the UX coming from a professional game developer, if you have any. I understand that your system is dialled in to your own tastes, and that you plan to improve upon TU's whole ecosystem.

Edited yesterday at 03:52 AM by Halban

[Nertea]

27 minutes ago, Halban said:

professional game developer

lol barely, I hate this industry.

Yeah I looked at all the existing recolor 'products' as part of starting this out. I think there's some things that work quite well with your mod (focusing on swatches is nice obvs, also there's some good work in the subarea selection stuff). I think you're in a good place - there's a bunch of alternate approaches one could take with recoloring that many games have experimented with. If you want to dig into that, I'd recommend a quick browse through customizers for various games. Focus on RTSses, MOBAs, things that aren't first person or RPGs for good examples. The thing I've done is for example highly inspired by Dawn of War's 2's army painter, which I love. 

tbh I think you're a little hamstrung by TU and its conventions, and the way people have used them over the years- you have to work against that. That's partially the reason I've taken such a clean-sheet approach, I have a fairly specific goal for what I want players to be able to do and what level of customization I want to supply.  I can design the art, assets, UI and UX to cater to that exact vision (and it's intentionally less complex and arguably less capable than TU), which ets me take shortcuts and not deal with some of the stuff that you've had to. I also had a goal to integrate this seamlessly as a 'construction tool' so I put a lot of work into that. 

29 minutes ago, Spartwo said:

Will be an awful shame if the final product has no hex/rgb/hsv selection, feel a lack of that will be a step backwards if anything.

That's a stretch goal. Eventually I'd like people to be able to define a custom swatch and assign it, but doing investigation of how people used texture painting, both in KSP2 and the KSP1 mods, the far more common use pattern is to pick one or two common colours and use them throughout a switch. A (config-defined) swatch-based approach is much faster to develop, has cleaner consistency and seems to cover most use cases.

 

[Halban]

Thanks, I appreciate your reponse. I noticed that both Technicolor and my mod Stapler are dancing around Tweakscale with regards to the editor FSM and UI. On first glance it seems like Stapler, Technicolor and Tweakscale (and subsequent mods that add construction tools) might need to be made explicitly compatible with eachother, which isn't an attractive solution. I don't have any ideas right now but I ancitipate that we could organise an extensible way of adding construction tools to the editor.

Edited yesterday at 05:15 AM by Halban

[缪zy]

Isn't it 50.88%?

9 hours ago, Spartwo said:

Looks great! Bit frustrating from the perspective of a 70% complete restock TURD pack.

Will be an awful shame if the final product has no hex/rgb/hsv selection, feel a lack of that will be a step backwards if anything.

 

[Spartwo]

59 minutes ago, 缪zy said:

Isn't it 50.88%?

 

Not anymore 

[缪zy]

1 hour ago, Spartwo said:

Not anymore 

wow

[Nertea]

12 hours ago, Halban said:

Thanks, I appreciate your reponse. I noticed that both Technicolor and my mod Stapler are dancing around Tweakscale with regards to the editor FSM and UI. On first glance it seems like Stapler, Technicolor and Tweakscale (and subsequent mods that add construction tools) might need to be made explicitly compatible with eachother, which isn't an attractive solution. I don't have any ideas right now but I ancitipate that we could organise an extensible way of adding construction tools to the editor.

It would be great. but that definitely needs a better software dev than me  (I'd ask @JonnyOThan if he has ideas) . I honestly didn't know about Stapler until now. I had thought that TS was the only mod that was brave enough to go in there lol. Happy to support whatever could be sorted.

[fatcargo]

On 2/20/2025 at 6:50 PM, Nertea said:

With the advent of Deferred

Deferred as in "deferred shader" ??? In KSP 1 ???
Also reading docs - question : are shadows any better than stock ? ie even 2x texture size (next larger) IMO should drastically improve shadow casting.

Edited 19 hours ago by fatcargo
more questions

[JonnyOThan]

1 hour ago, fatcargo said:

Deferred as in "deferred shader" ??? In KSP 1 ???
Also reading docs - question : are shadows any better than stock ? ie even 2x texture size (next larger) IMO should drastically improve shadow casting.

As in “deferred rendering” which was release by blackrack several months ago.  I’m not sure what you mean about shadow casting. Textures don’t have much to do with shadows unless you mean the resolution of the normal map or something.

14 hours ago, Halban said:

Thanks, I appreciate your reponse. I noticed that both Technicolor and my mod Stapler are dancing around Tweakscale with regards to the editor FSM and UI. On first glance it seems like Stapler, Technicolor and Tweakscale (and subsequent mods that add construction tools) might need to be made explicitly compatible with eachother, which isn't an attractive solution. I don't have any ideas right now but I ancitipate that we could organise an extensible way of adding construction tools to the editor.

Yeah….we should probably build some infrastructure around that.

[fatcargo]

59 minutes ago, JonnyOThan said:

As in “deferred rendering” which was release by blackrack several months ago.  I’m not sure what you mean about shadow casting. Textures don’t have much to do with shadows unless you mean the resolution of the normal map or something.

Ok that clears things up. I'll look into how its done, if that rabbit hole isn't too deep.
As for shadow casting - i was hoping that with more lights / optimized lighting come also shadows with bigger shadow maps, can't really blame me for hoping

 

Edited 16 hours ago by fatcargo

[Svm420]

5 hours ago, Nertea said:

It would be great. but that definitely needs a better software dev than me  (I'd ask @JonnyOThan if he has ideas) . I honestly didn't know about Stapler until now. I had thought that TS was the only mod that was brave enough to go in there lol. Happy to support whatever could be sorted.

RCSBuildaid was the first to use another alphanumeric key as a shortcut. It was alpha5 now that Tweakscale has taken that for itself I had RCS on alpha6. Now it seems you will be using some of those as well. So I will need to update my setting one more time to avoid conflict

[PicoSpace]

Suggestion:

Since we are looking at a PBR solution, is there a way to have parts change their settings mod-flight?

 

im thinking burn marks (darkening) or roughness shift (wear) when parts get heated through decent re-entry (or various damage mods… stretch goal?).
 

That way it visually shows flight tested equipment, and if it can work with scrapyard it would make reusing parts more authentic.