Deathsoul097 Star Industries

[Deathsoul097]

A development thread for stock alike NTRs, and clustered 2.5 and 3.5 engines, swell as structural parts and fuel tanks. I currently need someone who knows how to moddle parts, and may be able to show me how in blender. If you accept you will be regarded as an official member of D097 Star industries.

[Deathsoul097]

I am able to write the .CFGs for these parts, all I need is someone to teach me to model engines and use UV maps.

[KhaosCorp]

Youtube......

[Greys]

Modelling is actually very easy, honestly the hardest part is cfgs and textures that look decent; You can probably learn to make half decent models over a weekend some time and especially with KSP addons, whatever you make will be composed largely of basic shapes and low poly compared to higher fidelity games. Skilled application of textures, emissives, bumpmaps, etc, all help to counter the inherent lack of fidelity, but a lot of that is artistic talent so it's more difficult to learn.

As far as your first step, you'll need two pieces of software, Blender, and Unity (google will show the way), Blender's fairly scary at first look but once you figure out the control scheme it's pretty easy to grasp, and a surprizing amount of things can be figured out by simple exploration and trial. Both are free btw. Blender also has literally months if not years worth of video tutorials, and books worth of written tutorials, literally books, that you can buy. But also online written tutorials for free. It's the most common modelling application used for KSP so far as I'm aware, so if you're ever stuck you can ask here and somebody will point the way. Unity on the other hand is just a process, you use it to turn your models in whatever application you choose into a package that KSP can take, and everything you might want to do in it works a specific way. No skill, just a series of steps.

I went from not knowing how to do anything to having a set of parts that I was using in my every day game in about a week, it took longer to get them to a stage where I wasn't embarrassed to show them to others, and I'm still in the process of balancing them and tweaking things now a few months later, but KSP is amazingly easy to get into.

The only key is that you have to try, give it an honest effort, read things, watch things, listen to what they have to say, and for now don't worry about the result, just do it.

[Deathsoul097]

Thank you Greys, I know how to use blender, I just need help with how to work everything, and to figure out UV maps.

[Greys]

UV's are a skill learned with practice, the basic concept is that you want to place seams on the model to allow the faces to be laid flat with as little distortion to their actual shape as possible, preferably in a way that makes drawing on that flat sheet as easy as possible. Once you get your head wrapped around the goal it becomes a matter of practice to lay down your seams in the best ways, but then you have to deal with the actual unwrapping. If you're using blender there is unfortunately a secret bullshat button in a secret context sensitive panel. Blender defaults to unwrapping models "Angle Based", which attempts to preserve the angle of edges compared to other edges, which gives you... things that don't make much sense

The other option for how to unwrap is "Conformal", which tries to preserve the shape of each face independent of the rest. It's confusing to me why this isn't the default.

The switch between the two exists in a contextual panel that only shows them immediately after you unwrap, once you click anything else it goes away

I'm not going to provide another image, but when I switch to Conformal, that same set of faces unwraps into a very good approximation of the shape that they actually are, which makes everything easier.

Once you have it unwrapping into islands you can work with (an island is a set of faces that are not separated by seams) it's just a matter of fitting everything together in the most ideal way you can figure out. Overlap islands that will use the same texture, weld islands that represent identical features, minimize the small elements and maximize the elements that need the most detail.

As an example: http://i.imgur.com/YxHneeR.png

With the exception of the asterisk shaped island and the big hexagonal island all of those island are 6~ identical islands that will be textured identically, so they don't need to take up 6x the sheet. And for the big hexagon, each side is roughly the same as the width of the big square part of the island in the bottom left, but the hexagon will have significantly more valuable detail on it, so giving it more resolution allows me to put more detailed texture work on that set of faces (also that set of faces doesn't need to be as complex as it is, I'm better now than I was when I made that part and I should revisit it)

[Deathsoul097]

Thank you very much, that is exactly what I needed to know.