What's wrong with my part?

[SiliconPyro]

It looks like it has its own light shining on it. The texture is just light gray and black, so it shouldn't be from that. I'm using the KSP diffuse shader and the texture is exported as a .tga compressed, but I got the same results with a .mbm. Is this because I haven't included a normal map?

[Razorcane]

What 3D program do you use?

[SiliconPyro]

I use Blender.

[NoMrBond]

I think it might be Unity in this case, is the shader set to Diffuse instead of KSP\Diffuse?

[SiliconPyro]

I think it might be Unity in this case, is the shader set to Diffuse instead of KSP\Diffuse?

Yes, I'm certain it's set to KSP\Diffuse. Now that I've got the process down, I'll make a new part from start to finish. Maybe I mucked something up while I was trying to get it to work.

[SasquatchM]

Is the edge split not set up correctly?

[SiliconPyro]

Is the edge split not set up correctly?

It's possible since I don't know what that is, haha. How do I set it up correctly?

[Lumicide]

Did you export as .obj, or .fbx? I noticed those sorts of shading issues in Unity with .obj exports, but they weren't there in .fbx.

[Porkjet]

Is the tip still bright outside the VAB or if you rotate it around?

To me it looks like a shading thing, which is quite a problem on cones. The shading smooths over the tip of the cone and tries to make it look round. Which is why your tip is bright, the light source in the VAB comes from above. You can't even do edgebreaks on cone tips since you just want a shading break in the tip and I don't know if any program can do this on a single point. You can work around this by adding a ring of lines close to the tip, this will move the rounded shading way up to the tip and the rest of the cone should look OK. So its best you make the tip slightly 'blunt'. Another way is to let the whole thing as it is and add a normal map to force the shading to look like a cone, if you know how to do that.

[SiliconPyro]

Did you export as .obj, or .fbx? I noticed those sorts of shading issues in Unity with .obj exports, but they weren't there in .fbx.

I saved it from Blender as a .blend straight into the Unity assets folder.

[SiliconPyro]

Is the tip still bright outside the VAB or if you rotate it around?

To me it looks like a shading thing, which is quite a problem on cones. The shading smooths over the tip of the cone and tries to make it look round. Which is why your tip is bright, the light source in the VAB comes from above. You can't even do edgebreaks on cone tips since you just want a shading break in the tip and I don't know if any program can do this on a single point. You can work around this by adding a ring of lines close to the tip, this will move the rounded shading way up to the tip and the rest of the cone should look OK. So its best you make the tip slightly 'blunt'. Another way is to let the whole thing as it is and add a normal map to force the shading to look like a cone, if you know how to do that.

Actually, it's like that from multiple angles. No, I don't know how to do a normal map. I'll try a cylinder and see if the lighting is different. Thanks for the insight.

Do you have a link to a simple normal mapping tutorial using Blender?

[NoMrBond]

Try going to object mode

Select all

set [shade Smooth]

add Modifier>Edge Spilt>Apply

Modifier is the small blue spanner, usually on the right panel

[Razorcane]

Does Blender have smoothing groups? That would probably fix the issue. Edge Split sounds a little dodgy, as if it actually splits edges, which causes lots of problems when you triangulate.

[NoMrBond]

You can set smooth/flat shading per vertex (or is it per face?) in Blender if you like, I found that level of manual minutiae just excruciating

The Edge Split modifier isn't too bad though, it doesn't split everything, you can set custom tolerances for when an edge gets split before applying

Unity also does mesh optimisation on import which I haven't run into any troubles with yet (that where not of my own making)

[Razorcane]

You can set smooth/flat shading per vertex (or is it per face?) in Blender if you like, I found that level of manual minutiae just excruciating

The Edge Split modifier isn't too bad though, it doesn't split everything, you can set custom tolerances for when an edge gets split before applying

Unity also does mesh optimisation on import which I haven't run into any troubles with yet (that where not of my own making)

Yea that sounds like a bad thing in my line of work, since I work with mainly high-poly meshes(100k+) I can't believe that Blender, being as feature filled as it is, lacks a set of smoothing groups for meshes. It's probably the most handy tool in my work, and it amazes me that it lacks that. It also sounds like a bad thing for games as well, as splitting edges doubles vertices, which uses more resources. It also presents problems when unwrapping meshes and painting them in external programs like MARI, where you paint directly on the mesh.

As for the OP, I suggest switching to something like 3DS Max or Maya. Both of those are industry standard tools and you'll get everything you need to keep things like this from happening. I really have no place making comments in this thread though, as I am partially biased because of my involvement in said industry. I'm sure Blender is a very powerful tool, but it has some pretty barbaric methods of solving problems like these, which I find troublesome. There might be scripts that allow for better smoothing options though, so you might want to try those.

[NoMrBond]

There could certainly be better ways of handling it in Blender that I'm simply not aware of, my knowledge of Blender could charitably be described, at best, as poor, although I enjoy experimenting with it as time permits

Blender is also free, so comparing its feature-set to something like Maya, which starts at ~$800 USD, well I'm sure you're getting a lot of features for your $800, but it's tough to beat the features-per-dollar ratio when the dollars are zero. There are plenty of custom scripts and help for Blender through its community, I should really find one for adjusting origin orientation to help with animations.

I don't know why you would run Blenders ES-Modify before unwrapping, that'd be torture (UV unwrapping is already torturous at the best of times to start with). It should be the last thing you do before loading it up in Unity (according to what I've read/seen so far anyway).

[SiliconPyro]

Yeah, my budget for messing around and modding KSP is exactly $0. I'm going to keep messing around in Blender. I tried a cylinder with the same results.

[SiliconPyro]

Okay, this looks better. I think it would help if I just had a more detailed texture, but it's normal mapped now and it takes shadows just fine. Time to make something more complicated!

Thanks to everyone who offered advice and suggestions.