The COMPLETE KSP Blender Tutorial! [Video Back!]

[Omnivore]

The trial part is the hardest, my errors come naturally.

Speaking of which... I\'m currently working on a complex object, one built up of separate meshes and dupes and rotations of those meshes. I\'m wondering how important it is to delete surfaces that end up being interior ones? In other words, about how many vertices in a part before it starts becoming really important to strip every last cotton picking hidden one? Along with that, is there any tool in Blender that would let me select all the faces that intersect or fall within a given volume (or mesh)? Also, any way to merge uvmaps from meshes that you forgot to map before duping but are essentially just rotated dupes?

[Technical Ben]

Tiberion, there are 3 things that make polys disapear it seems. Back to front normals, where you just need to press 'flip normal' on the surface or 'recalculate normals'. Textures not painted on that part (so it\'s transparent) and the camera being too close.

Sarkun 'turn quads into tris' is not necessarily needed, but it\'s a recommendation in case Blender does not do it automatically on export settings. Blender, being a 3D art program has many tools and features that KSP does not. One of these is it can use shapes that are 'true' curves or even make shapes out of 'Quads' (rectangles). However, nearly all games and graphics cards use triangles to make 3d objects and put textures on them. So before we send the part to KSP it\'s best to tell Blender to turn all those complicated shapes into triangles.

If you use any other complicated modifiers or curves, these also need to be turned into solid triangles. However, I\'ve not gone that far with Blender yet. One example is hair. Blender has a fully integrated hair simulator. But KSP won\'t allow us to have fluffy rockets!

[Tiberion]

Yeah I eventually got it, including cloned bell with reversed normals for the 'inside'

I had to select each 'ring of faces' that was bugged, make sure their bounding edges (the rim edges) were completely 'sharpened' and then recalculate separately - doing them as a group didn\'t work.

[sarkun]

So I did what Tiberion suggested with the edges on my rocket and some textures are missing (probably the inverted normals thing?) The question I have: is there a way to see which way the normals point in blender? Cause I can recalculate them a hundred times but I can\'t see anything changing in blender, so I\'m not sure if it actually does anything or maybe I\'m in a wrong mode, not selected enough vertices etc....

One thing I dislike about blender is that it doesn\'t seem to be too keen on giving feedback to the (noob) user - some things change and I don\'t know how I did that, what changed exactly and by how much...

And I can\'t believe I just spent my whole Sunday creating an engine for KSP...

EDIT:

typos

[Technical Ben]

If that is a first attempt, it\'s very good sarkun.

Normally, in other programs I can get arrows up on screen, I\'m not sure if Blender does this. Yes, Blender will show the normals. You can go to 'View' then 'Properties' (A long list should appear to the right) then under 'Mesh Display' tick 'Normals: Face'. You now see a blue line pointing outside. To see the same as in game you can also go to 'Display' and tick 'Textured Solid'. This will use the same type of display system the game uses. So any 'back to front' normals will show as transparent. Just click on them in 'face select mode' and then 'flip normals' to put them back the correct way.

Hope that helps. I agree most of the options in Blender are not user friendly. But when we learn how to do it, it should allow us to mod anything needed. Perhaps if you want, you can make the model in Sketchup, or other software, and import/export through Blender? I\'ll have a go at a Sketchup Tutorial eventually. However, Sketchup completely ruins the scene files so you cannot export them. :/

[trvtannenberg]

I have a problem with texture, it looks that. What i should do to fix this? There are blender files of this decoupler.

I fixed it.

(And, this decoupler destroy everything in it, when i try to decouple.

part.cfg

// --- asset parameters ---

mesh = dec.DAE

scale = 1

texture = texture.png

specPower = 0.4

rimFalloff = 3

alphaCutoff = 0

// --- node definitions ---

// definition format is Position X, Position Y, Position Z, Up X, Up Y, Up Z

node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.756, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0

node_stack_top00 = 0.0, 0.83, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0

//node_stack_top01 = 0.0, -0.368, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0

node_stack_MLFE = 0.0, -0.25, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0

node_stack_SLFE = 0.0, 0.246, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0

node_stack_StockLFE = 0.0, -0.596, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0

// --- FX definitions ---

fx_gasBurst_white = 0.0, 0.83, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, activate

fx_gasBurst_white = 0.0, -0.756, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, activate

sound_vent_medium = activate

// --- editor parameters ---

cost = 1200

category = 2

subcategory = 0

title = title

manufacturer = manufacturer

description = description.

// attachment rules: stack, srfAttach, allowStack, allowSrfAttach, allowCollision

attachRules = 1,0,1,1,1

// --- standard part parameters ---

mass = 0.5

dragModelType = default

maximum_drag = 0.2

minimum_drag = 0.2

angularDrag = 2

crashTolerance = 18

maxTemp = 3400

breakingForce = 160000

breakingTorque = 160000

stageAfter = True

stageBefore = True

fuelCrossFeed = False

// --- Stage Separator parameters ---

ejectionForce = 20

// ----- DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS POINT ------

)

[Technical Ben]

That sounds like your collision mesh is overlapping the parts. If any parts over lap, it will explode. Also make sure your part and it\'s collision mesh are centred on the scene in Blender before you export too (might help to make sure the part\'s own axis is centred too).

[trvtannenberg]

That sounds like your collision mesh is overlapping the parts. If any parts over lap, it will explode. Also make sure your part and it\'s collision mesh are centred on the scene in Blender before you export too (might help to make sure the part\'s own axis is centred too).

Yes, i\'ve fixed it.

[prefim]

Do we know a way to import existing DAE into blender? i\'m just getting parsing errors.

[Technical Ben]

Where is the existing DAE from? If it\'s from the game... I can\'t find the thread right now, but someone figured out what to change to make it load...

[Epsilon]

Okay. If the DAE wasn\'t exported with Blender it won\'t work normally.

What you have to do is open the .dae file in word pad, and go down to the line

1.000000</color>
      </ambient>
      <diffuse>
       <texture texture='Map #26-image' texcoord='CHANNEL0'>
        <extra>
         <technique profile='MAYA'>
          <wrapU sid='wrapU0'>TRUE</wrapU>
          <wrapV sid='wrapV0'>TRUE</wrapV>
          <blend_mode>ADD</blend_mode>
         </technique>
        </extra>
       </texture>
      </diffuse>
      <specular>
       <color sid='specular'>0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000</color>

Remove everything from diffuse to diffuse. Thank Privateer for that one.

Maybe I should make a thread with this so it could be stickied...

[prefim]

Worked a treat! thanks guys!

[Omnivore]

I got tired of manually editing dae files for import to Blender, so I wrote a little Python script that should take care of most dae file problems.

Written and tested with Python 2.6.6, some knowledge of using python scripts would be helpful to the user

[Epsilon]

I\'m going here for help now lol.

I made a part in blender, textured it, wrote up the config, added the node_collider and what not, packaged it up, and when I tried loading it in part lab...

Can someone help me please?

[Technical Ben]

Looks fine. What\'s missing? You can select all the faces and then 'smooth' them. Then go to 'modifiers' and 'edge split' and that will separate the edges nicely. That should remove all the jaggedness. The 'object reference not set' error might be the scene light or camera trying to load on the part. Not sure, but if it works in game, just ignore the error. As Harv is adding a part converter later, I\'ll not bother cleaning up the scenes really. But I will add the smoothing bit to the tutorial. I\'ve been more busy than I was expecting this last week or so, and will be this weekend. :/

[Epsilon]

Oh thank you. That\'s why my models sucked so bad (of course the textures still do, but that\'s my inability to use any image editing program)

The thing is, there is a full texture, and that\'s not showing. The game just doesn\'t load with the part, it does it\'s usual load forever thing. I already thought about that removing the camera and stuff, but it didn\'t do any good. I had to do some fiddling to get the texture to just alone appear on the model, so maybe that\'s what\'s throwing it off.

[Technical Ben]

Have you named the collider object 'node_collider'? Is the texture in the correct folder? You need to add the name to the part.config file too. That\'s covered in the modding wiki (not here, sorry).

[feanor]

I have a request for tips. What is the most efficient way to make a metal mesh? Think of stuff like the soyuz interstage:

http://cosmopark.ru/r7/511_561b.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martintrolle/4624133190/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martintrolle/4623532421/

How do you do this efficiently, symmetric and mirrored? which options do I have to use?

Adding cilinders, cubes and other shapes for basic rocketry are going fine now, but this? phew. Anyone care to give a small walktrough?

Thanks in advance

[Epsilon]

I have a request for tips. What is the most efficient way to make a metal mesh? Think of stuff like the soyuz interstage:

http://cosmopark.ru/r7/511_561b.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martintrolle/4624133190/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martintrolle/4623532421/

How do you do this efficiently, symmetric and mirrored? which options do I have to use?

Adding cilinders, cubes and other shapes for basic rocketry are going fine now, but this? phew. Anyone care to give a small walktrough?

Thanks in advance

You could always try transparent texturing. That\'s how it\'s done for the parachute cables.

Make a cylinder the size it needs to be, remove the caps. Then, duplicate that and flip all the faces of the new one, shrink it a hair (so you can see the struts on the inside).

Then, UV map it, make the texture, and around the beams make it 100% transparent. The Alpha MUST be zero, as it\'s single bit transparency. If all goes well, only the beams will show up as the texture. If you are concerned about the red tint issue, I think saving it to a different bit level (I have no idea what it is) will resolve this problem.

[SmiteZero]

The problem with transparent textures is that AFAIK if you see them from the back side (opposite the surface normals) it will show things a bit funny.

[Technical Ben]

To solve that you can double up the poly (put a cylinder inside a cylinder, and reverse the normals for the internal one).

However, there is no need in this case as far as I can tell. KSP should be able to handle the extra polys if you want to model it in full 3d.

I\'d suggest either lining up some square/hexagonal bars around a doughnut or hollow cylinder shape. Or cut the shape out of a cylinder. Start with a cylinder the size of the construction, then place a slightly smaller but taller one inside. Then use the boolean function to 'subtract' (I think it\'s called 'difference in blender) the shape from the centre. Then put some triangular blocks around the centre too, and subtract them (you might need to do one at a time, or experiment with it).

[Caesar15]

I got stuck when you clicked add mesh, what do I do with the mesh?do I move it in a new place or keep it inside the other mesh

[Technical Ben]

Remember to press Tab when told to. If the tutorial does not ask you to move it, then don\'t move it. If it asks you to move it, then move it.

[Th3Cap3]

Thanks for making this tutorial Ben, it gave me the basics to start failing on my own :-P Looking forward to some more advanced tutorials in the future.

A tip to some of you, something I learned in my course of failing, the part won\'t load properly in partlab if you don\'t have your attach points close to being right (as in, inside the model). This may or may not be entirely true, but it has happened to me, and then the part would load properly once I moved the connection points farther out.

[Dr Reed]

Awesome tutorial. 8)

I managed to get a working model in the game within an hour of seeing this thread.

Thank you.