Emissive tutorial

[CardBoardBoxProcessor]

You should watch C7s tutorial first and make sure everything normal works fine before adding emissives. I thought there would be one out by now. But alas there is not. So here you all go

1. Select your material for your part

2. Find KSP

3. Select Emissive. pick one of the options. They are self explanatory, Specular gives emissive with specular and such.

1. Put your diffuse in the top box.

2. put your emissive in the Emissive Slot.

3. Emissive textures should be black where they should be uneffected, white where fully effected. The whiter the more it will glow. Note the nozzle section of the emissive map is white where as the rest is black. the small tubes and details are faint grey. This will make the nozzle the most effected/the brightest.

1. Select your Game object

2. Go to Window>Animation

3. Note the animation window with your part name in it.

1. Click the arrow to drop down the list of other items.

2. note The parts parented to the main part are now visible.

1.Click the little arrow thing I have circled

2. Click Create New Clip

3. Name the animation and remember the name.

1. find the material name under the part and expand it.

2. set the time to 0 by typing 0 into the box the 2 is on

3. notice the 3 emissive color values. Select them so you don\'t mistake them for another component.

1. For the three colors click the little DASH to the right of the name

2. Hit add Key. You can use curves but they are a little whacky. You can always click the dash (which will have become a diamond) and delete curve if you make a mistake.

2b. Do this for all three.

1. Change the time to 60 seconds. This is an adequate amount of time to give enough control of the animation with out too many frames. You can type the value or drag the bare where the red arrow is.

2. At the 60 frame mark add Keys to each of the three emissive colors again.

1. Notice I am playing with obj_gimbals\'s material\'s values at the 60 frame mark and the model shows this happening. You can manually type the values in OR

2. Drag the keis up and down in the curve window.

3. If you cannot see the tops of the keys you can hit the play button and then go back to the same time and it will adjust the focus of the curve window to fit better.

4. notice only the part I am adding keys for changes. you need to add keys to all parts you want effected. This allows for different colors on different parts and materials and such.

5. now all you need to do is make the animation as you would like to see it and export your part to .mu

6. Please note that this is based off engine heat. about half way through the animation is all you will see if you never get an overheat warning on your engine. after you get an over heat warning it will begin to play the rest of the animation. Keep this in mind.

7. You can add as many keys between the two as you want to adjust what you see in game. I like to have it slowly heat then at the half way point really make it glow how to signify overheating. i do this by adding more keys and making it sort of make a tilted ~ shape in the curve window.

1. add 'ThermalAnim = <the name of your animation you named in picture 5> ' and then you should beable to see it in game,

Moderates pPLEASE do not remove the images. High Quality is essential for the modder to see exactly what to click and do as Unity has small text. As for smart Phones. I doubt there people are modelling on smart phones.

[CardBoardBoxProcessor]

apparently this got deleted. thank hoojiwana for its return.

[hoojiwana]

Hmm, I did just actually find an October 2012 version of the thread here, so I don't know if you want to keep this or not. Silly me for asking after it when it was already here!

[Kommitz]

You wouldn't happen to know anything about the quality/colour depth of emmissives? I've tried a few different formats for the source files and they all end up with noticeable banding when imported into the game even when it's not present in Unity (after conversion to mbm, maybe that's the problem...).

[EndlessWaves]

Moderates pPLEASE do not remove the images. High Quality is essential for the modder to see exactly what to click and do as Unity has small text. As for smart Phones. I doubt there people are modelling on smart phones.

The forum scales them down automatically so it is a good idea to use thumbnails or close ups in the thread and link them to the full screen images.

[hoojiwana]

You wouldn't happen to know anything about the quality/colour depth of emmissives? I've tried a few different formats for the source files and they all end up with noticeable banding when imported into the game even when it's not present in Unity (after conversion to mbm, maybe that's the problem...).

I've done some testing tonight myself and it seems that the DXT compression that KSP does to textures on load causes emissives to have that happen. Looks to be unavoidable on finer detail for emissive textures, as far as I can tell. I might be wrong.

[Absolution]

Are emissives tied to engine heat only? Can I tie it to something else or even nothing at all? I would like to create a persistent glowing effect independent of other variables. Perhaps something that "pulses" over time. Is that doable?

[Deltafee]

How would we use this for things that are not engines? such as generators or sensors?

[Absolution]

*edit* after rereading the post above I came to realize my first response didn't make sense. Ignore.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Absolution

[KhaosCorp]

Does anyone have a link to this C7 tutorial that is mentioned in OP?

[Absolution]

Does anyone have a link to this C7 tutorial that is mentioned in OP?

I believe he is referring to the following:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/938-Part-Modeling-in-Maya-how-to-guide

As in he suggests that you have a basic understanding of how to model and export to KSP before trying intermediate level techniques like Emmisives.

-----

Also not stated in the tutorial above (unless I missed it) is that when setting up the animation you should disable the check box titled "play automatically" in the inspector window of the gameobject you added the animation to.

You can read more about it here:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/27450?p=346176&viewfull=1#post346176

[CardBoardBoxProcessor]

I was glad to see this tutorial is still here. I should probably make it a video at some point since things have changed a tad in unity.

[Sethnizzle]

Could someone do a quick write up on how it is different now? Or link to a new tutorial?

Edit: I get to the step where you click on your GameObject and then go to Window and then Animate. When the animation window shows up there is no GameObject to select.

What I am trying to do is make it look like a heat sink heats up and then cools down after you click the run experiment button for the new part I am creating.

Edit 2: It looks like I've stumbled my way to getting the part to animate in Unity. But...

To be sure the animation is supposed to be a component of the GameObject correct? And I can't seem to get it to work in KSP. I've looked at config files for stock and mod animated science parts and still can't figure out how to get it to work. So far everything I have tried either causes the part to have a status of locked and you can't perform the science experiment, or the part doesn't load at all.

Edited January 6, 2014 by Sethnizzle

[laggerd]

my animation window does not have my GameObject in it. How can I fix this?

[laggerd]

whenever i export unity freezes up until I end it from task manager

[DMagic]

Edit: Don't use Unity 4.3 if you're trying to do emissive animations for KSP. Either stick with an older version, or download 4.2.2 from their archive. If they fix this issue I'll put those big pictures illustrating how the new animation window works, but for now I'll save space and leave them off.

So apparently newer versions of Unity have changed the way the animation window works. Which is great if you're trying to follow the approximately 8 million tutorials that describe the old method. The procedure is pretty simple though. Set up your part and textures the same as described before. Once you have your emissive textures in place open the animation window.

This is where problems might arise. The animation window comes up blank.

To fix this, first add an animation name by clicking somewhere in the animation window's toolbar. Then make sure the red record button is on. Physical objects can be added just by dragging them around the screen (click on one of the direction arrows), then the transform options will appear in the window. Imported animations should already display all of the objections with transforms applied to them.

For the other options you need to go to the "Add Curve" button though. Click on that and it will give you a hierarchy arranged in the same order as in the main window. Open the tree down to the object you want to apply the emissive texture to, in this case the cone. Then open "Mesh Renderer" and click the arrow to the right of the "Material._Emissive Color" option, shown by the big red arrow below. That will give you the four emissive color options in the animation window and you can make key frames as described in the first post.

Play back the animation with the play button to check if it's working. (And if you want to zoom in on the time axis or the amplitude axis of the animation window without affecting the other, hold Ctrl or Shift while scrolling with the mouse wheel)

I hope this helps in case anyone else was running into this same issue.

Edited January 22, 2014 by DMagic

[Sethnizzle]

And then what? I've been able to get this far but can't seem to figure out how to get it properly working in the game. Even Frizzank took the part I was working on, and got it to work, but I could never recreate whatever it is he did and I have done everything I have read in tutorials and seemingly everything I could think of. I used my config file on the part he sent back to me to confirm that wasn't the issue too. So there is something critically missing from the tutorial in the OP, your updated tutorial, every other bit on emissives in the forums, and getting it working in game.

[DMagic]

Ok, ignore all that junk in my last post. The problem seems to be the new version of Unity. I went back to Unity 4.2.2 and everything seems to work ok.

I pointed the areas that might be of importance below (I spent very little time playing with this in Unity 4.2, I was too tired of fiddling around in Unity 4.3, so there could be other issues). I put the mesh directly under the GameObject, though I don't think that's necessary. I put the animation component in the root mesh part. There is no animator component, I didn't add or remove one, and creating the animation in the animation window didn't add one. The only key frames I made were for the emissive color under the material for the mesh. Everything is basically as described in this and the other emissive tutorials that I've found on the forums (the ones linked to in the modding compilation thread).

Here it is in game... sweet part right?

So if you're having issues with Unity animations try going back to 4.2 (I didn't try earlier versions of 4.3, but they made some changes to the way animations work in that update, which I assume is causing this issue). All old versions of Unity are available here: http://unity3d.com/unity/download/archive. There may be some way around this issue, or it may require fixing, either on Squad's side or on Unity's, but for now the old version seems to work ok.

To be clear, I didn't have any issues with regular Unity animations (transforms), or imported animations, it was only when I tried adding these mesh renderer components that I had problems (the KSP log was spitting out some Unity animation error about SetCurve something or other).

[Sethnizzle]

I hope this is my only problem, lol. I am downloading 4.2.2 now and will update later.

Again I want to thank you DMagic, Frizzank, and everyone else who has provided assistance with this stuff. I know I appreciate it a lot and I'm sure the few others I've talked to who were just getting into using emissive textures about the same time as me do to.

EDIT:

Success! Suck it Unity 4.3.2... I felt like I was going crazy because I couldn't get it to work. I basically did the exact same thing in 4.2.2 that I had been doing in 4.3.2 (besides the minor differences in the way animations are created) and it worked perfectly the first try. I guess I had put too much faith in the developers of Unity so I didn't think to downgrade. Thanks DMagic!

Edited January 22, 2014 by Sethnizzle
SUCCESS!

[Naten]

kees me, Box Processor. I love you... .-.

Now my engine will glow. Also, I can mess around and make green-glowing nuclear generators.

I can finally maek some sort of animay-shun in Yoonit-E!!11

The possibilities are endless! You've inspired me, Box Processor, with your amazing models! Now I can finally do things, and maybe someday my work won't be compared to you in epsilons, maybe even millionths as great as yours! :D

Thank you for making this and whatever comes next. I'm sure someday, I'll teach the Unity 6D modeling noobs how to get an emissive texture in!

Well, I'll be sure to thank you in the part's description.

is it hot in here, or is it just mah emissives

too cool for flight school

[SiliconPyro]

I had mine working, albeit glowing automatically in the VAB, so clicked 'Play Automatically' and then clicked 'write' again and now my part is not in KSP at all. I created a new part from scratch again, clicked 'write', works great. Add the animation, click 'write', part disappears from KSP. In the debug I can see the part.cfg for it, but it's the version without the part module for the emissive texture. I don't know why it's doing this.

I made a thread about it HERE, but nobody has commented.

[SiliconPyro]

I had mine working, albeit glowing automatically in the VAB, so clicked 'Play Automatically' and then clicked 'write' again and now my part is not in KSP at all. I created a new part from scratch again, clicked 'write', works great. Add the animation, click 'write', part disappears from KSP. In the debug I can see the part.cfg for it, but it's the version without the part module for the emissive texture. I don't know why it's doing this.

I made a thread about it HERE, but nobody has commented.

Figured it out. I got the correct version of Unity and Part Tools.

[DMagic]

i'm still relatively new at this, so forgive me if this sounds like a foolish question; but, how can i link the animation to the throttle instead of by heat production?

we're trying to get these to work, and many of my engines are going to be ion-types, so heat production will be limited

This is the module from a stock ion engine:

MODULE
{
      name = FXModuleAnimateThrottle
      animationName = colorAnimation
      dependOnEngineState = True
      responseSpeed = 0.5
}

I've never actually tried it, but I think you should be able to set it up the same way you would for ModuleAnimateHeat. Just make sure you get the animation name correct and see what happens.

[TK421d]

i actually discovered it just after i had posted, but TY for the reply.

on the downside though, it is "always on" and even with the enginestate line. i use the same config as you posted (except for the anim name of course) and the throttle works perfectly, but even in the VAB, and also in flight even when the engine is disabled it still glows at the lower end of my scale.

MODULE
{
	name = FXModuleAnimateThrottle
	animationName = ThAnim
	dependOnEngineState = True
	responseSpeed = 0.5
}

Edited May 4, 2014 by BobsYerUncle

[nli2work]

http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/cant-animate-color-value-of-materials

so yeah, broken by design...

Unity 4.2.x or earlier for emissives animation. looks like material animation is broken in Animator component as well. I don't know if partools 0.23 supports Animator.

Edited June 15, 2014 by nli2work