Jump to content

[WIP] Parts from my garden shed - SCANsat Antennae

Milkshakefiend

By Milkshakefiend
in KSP1 Mod Development

 Share

Recommended Posts

Milkshakefiend

Milkshakefiend

Posted
Posted (edited)

Evening all!

Welcome to my garden shed, where all manner of ill-conceived and possibly dangerous rocketry occurs. I'm working my way through part creation, so this thread will serve as a place where I post any progress. I'm very new to modelling/texturing, so any comments/criticism is welcomed.

I use a wide variety of mods, but I feel that the unmanned side could be expanded upon - so my first project is creating satellite parts.

First up is a few parts I've created over the past few days. From top to bottom we have a fairly useless GPS sensor array that I saw whilst browsing the internet and decided my GPS satellites had to have one. In the middle is a hexagonal drone core. It's purposefully fairly large and is designed to be used for large RemoteTech satellites/Kethane scanners. The larger size allows for a stronger reaction wheel system and a considerable internal battery. The bottom component is an expanded battery, for probes/satellites that require a large power draw during dark periods of orbit and lots of RTGs is undesirable for whatever reason.

d6gtlbAl.jpg

rDeh5J1l.jpg

Scaling and texturing isn't final yet, but this initial set of components is scaled at 2.5m. Larger/smaller parts will follow, in addition to other form factors and ancillary pieces like PVs as my skills/knowledge develops.

I plan to make RemoteTech and Kethane compatible scanners/dishes and custom heatshields for Deadly Reentry although if there is a particular part you'd like that you think would fit in to what I'm doing, please let me know.

Thanks for looking!

~M

Releases and screenshots:

SCANsat compatible antennae Extendable SAR Array, Collapsable Altimetry RADAR, Probe-sized RADAR altimetry dish, Covered Multi-Spectral scanner (14/11/13) - download HERE

Example album

Javascript is disabled. View full album
Edited by Milkshakefiend
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Blaylock1988

Blaylock1988

Posted
Posted (edited)

Nice job, the body looks like an old GPS I Navstar satellite. The sensor suite looks similar to the sensor suite on our GPS IIR-M satellites, but its missing the BDY optical sensor (I buy these for our GPS satellites). Add that if you are looking for more detail and things to add.

6z94.png

Figure24.png

It is an oval opening with a conical sun shroud, and is black on some satellites.

Satellite batteries are actually pretty small, our GPS IIF satellites have 4 of them and they are about the size of a large car battery.

Edited by Blaylock1988
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Milkshakefiend

Milkshakefiend

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thanks for the positive comments, all!

Nice job, the body looks like an old GPS I Navstar satellite. .

Haha, I like that you put up the two pictures that I shamelessly ripped off :D I saw them and went 'Whoa! Whatever that is, I need one in KSP!'. Once I have a strong command of Blender and enough texturing skills to do it justice, I'm probably going to re-do that part. I just saw a cool picture of the IFF on Google images, and I think the cube form factor body is going to be based off that. I like it.

Excellent looking parts. Can't wait for scanners and antennas - satellites in KSP really need some good looking parts, especially with science update coming :)

That was my thinking, also. Hopefully by the time 0.22 is out I'll have something worthy of release!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
krenshala

krenshala

Posted
Posted
Yeah most of those are different types of helical UHF L-band antennas.

And just before I got to your post I was looking at that GPS satellite and thinking to myself, "Okay, I know the engineers wouldn't just add spirals on it for fun. Not when even the mass of the paint matters at launch time. What the hell are they for?". Thank you for answering that question for me. ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Milkshakefiend

Milkshakefiend

Posted
  • Author
Posted

A quick update - the product of tonight's labours

eNBDcGvl.png

It's a slim inline RCS tank. The hexagonal part is the low-poly in game mesh; the exterior half-capsule bits are high poly I've been using for normal mapping - the helical part will be normal mapped in game instead of meshed. There are three of these half capsules around the perimeter of the tank right now. 6 looked a bit clustered, but I haven't ruled it out. UVs are all sorted so tomorrow will be adding more normal map detail and then possibly texturing. If that all goes smoothly I'm going to try and wrap my head around this ThrustTransform thing and crack on with some small RCS thrusters!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Themorris

Themorris

Posted
Posted
the transform is actually quite trivial in blender - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33593534/images/KSP/modelling/REDSTAR/redstar%20Adapter.png

Blender +Z is what I've been told is the working axis after unity gets hold of it.

Try this:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/181870-Blender-gt-Unity-Rotation-Fix

greetings,

Themorris

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Milkshakefiend

Milkshakefiend

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Mini-update. RCS tank is basically done. Today I learnt that you can use the alpha channels in textures for control of specularity, which is cool. Unfortunately it tooks me about 2 hours to wrestle GIMP into outputting a compatible image, so no progress on RCS thrusters tonight. If someone familiar with GIMP can outline their method of making specular maps that would be good. I spent ages buggering around with exporting/importing and creating masks which I then flatten and can't get back and my workflow is just a complete mess.

All finished and chock full of toxic monoprop. I think the normal mapped detail worked quite well in this case. The small hexagon on the top of the tank was the result of a happy accident during normal baking, but it looked cool so it stayed. I'm still undecided on the NFPA-704 symbols on the side.

EoOaZsn.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 1 month later...
Milkshakefiend

Milkshakefiend

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Small update. Hit a roadblock* on the hexagon form factor probe stuff, so I've started on making other things. My animation skills are zero, so in an attempt to teach myself animation in blender I decided an folding antenna of some sort could be good. - after the 0.22 !!SCIENCE!! update they might actually serve some real purpose. Here is the fruit of tonights labour - a surface attachable phased array synthetic aperture radar. So far the low-poly and high poly meshes are complete, with low poly UV unwrapped ready for normal baking. The animation is in an 'alpha' state. Some parts I'm not happy with and will need some key-frame alteration. The 'plate' form factor is inspired by a NASA example used on the shuttle. The transducer elements in mine are sized slightly differently for aesthetics (as well as the overall contraption being much smaller) but I liked the phased array design, so that's where it came from.

*Read: I have no idea where to take it

Here's the low poly in-game mesh animated. It's floating around 1700 tris right now. (Hi-poly is 400,00. It melted my iMac when I tried to render that.)

When it's finished I'll probably use it as a part for that snazzy new mapping plugin everyone is talking about. I think the chap making it is planning (or has implemented) several different types of scanning parts, so if this part goes well I'll think about creating others to go with it. I'll probably think about drawing up a roadmap of some description with an end goal of releasing some useful parts.

To do:

Tweak animation

Bake normals

Texture atlas

Import to Unity

Export, create config

...

...

...

SCAN!

Update: Normals made, texturing started. Animation plays in Unity, but haven't tried exporting into KSP yet.

zrnnxNj.png

Edited by Milkshakefiend
Update
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Milkshakefiend

Milkshakefiend

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)
Just wanted to give my support, nice job!

Thank you :)

Looking good! This is just what SCANsat is missing!

SCANsat looks really promising - I'm hoping I can make some parts that will do it justice.

nice job on the gold foil, I know a lot of people have trouble with that.

Including me! I can't take all the credit for the normals, I chopped up some pre-made ones I found on the internet. I can bake normal maps in Blender, but I have absolutely no idea how to make some thing like that. I've seen there are plugins available for GIMP to 'create' normal maps from images, but I'm having enough issues adjusting from PS to GIMP, let alone getting any 3rd party plugins to work (and me actually understand them!)

do you have any parts for release?

I personally would say 'no' as I don't think the parts on here are really ready, however if you want to play around with the HexProbe core/battery/GPS sensor/RCS etc I'm happy to email/Dropbox you the parts.

I'll edit this post with an update on the SAR array later. I'm close to finishing the texturing. If all goes smoothly (does it ever?) and I can export the part from Unity properly - I've read that there's no special export needed for parts with animation as long as the animation itself is imported correctly, which I think I've done - then I'll just need to write a .cfg and it'll be done. It's currently at 1800 tris, and 2 1024^2 textures. I may reduce that to 512^2. I suppose I should have a look at .cfgs for animations and any modules that SCANsat uses!

Mini-update: Well, the textures are about as good as I'll ever get them. I'm not entirely happy, but I think that's more a problem fundamentally with the design than anything else - I have more ideas for radars/scanners/dishes, so hopefully I can apply what I've learnt making this one to the next.

The base joint

2jBRlMU.png

The arms

iLUCFNi.png

The transducer arrays - I've added a small amount of blue into the specular reflections. I kind of like it, and with what I've learnt making the normals for the transducers and the specularity of this I think I can apply to PV panels as well.

xohr7hq.png

The main mounting 'body' is plain white with some edge darkening and a specularity that makes it looks quite like some sort of polycarbonate. I think it works, to a degree but its one of the areas I'm uncertain of.

Edited by Milkshakefiend
Mini update
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Milkshakefiend

Milkshakefiend

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Je suis fini! Mostly.

It appears in KSP, animates correctly, looks okay (ish) and works with SCANsat. I'm just working on having the animation tie into scanning state, so retracted arrays don't scan and having the animation start in the closed position without me having to re-export the animation from Blender.

Curiously, one of the meshes is appearing in KSP rotated 180 degrees even though it appears fine in Blender and Unity. Currently tracking down what is causing this.

Will edit the post with images and download link once I've squished these bugs.

EDIT: Some ingame shots. Trying to figure out how to trigger the extend/retract animation upon SCANsat activation right now. Currently there is a button to activate/disable SCANsat and a button to extend/retract, and once these are integrated I'll put a DL link up.

FitYXY5.png

An5yUF8.png

86YtMzE.png

Edited by Milkshakefiend
Update
Link to comment
Share on other sites
This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...