MainSailor's Textures (for Procedural Parts) - VERSION 2! (Now with more history) 5th of April 2016

[Phineas Freak]

Perfect! And yes, it is more that enough .

[MainSailor]

Something I'm working on now...any interest?

Does not currently have normals, but I'm tweaking the base texture before I start that.

[MainSailor]

Replaced album, see next post.

Edited February 12, 2016 by MainSailor

[MainSailor]

Some more progress shots:

I'm also getting ready for a pack re-alignment. The Ceres and Ariane (which I haven't come up with a name for yet) textures are the first of a new Theta texture pack. Common textures like the interstages, and some solid colors and randoms (like the Skylab, and a couple of other striped tanks) will be in a pack called Essentials. The Gamma series will continue unchanged, other than the move of the interstage tanks. Because the interstage tanks will be named the same, they shouldn't affect launched vessels (although I have yet to test.) They'll all be modular, so if you don't use one of them, you can just delete the folder. It will also simplify distribution, because you'd be able to update the individual packs just by dragging the folder into the MainSailor folder and overwriting.

 

I've also done some extra compression and resizing on the textures which will make the pack more memory friendly. Some of the textures will be halved in size (as I can't see a difference between the 1024px and 512px on some of them), as well as making most of the textures DXT1 (which is smaller than DXT5 which is what they're at now.) I'm also considering a smaller variant of the pack which would have the file dimensions by half...you'd trade out image quality for a reduced file and memory size, but if you had smaller parts or were zoomed out, you might not see the compression artifacts at all.

[MainSailor]

For those that are interested, I'm throwing up a beta copy of everything I'm currently working on. http://bit.ly/MSBeta2 

Going forward this link will contain the most up to date copy of my working file, so expect changes from time to time.

 

This pack currently contains: (as of 2nd March, 2016)

The Essentials Pack:

• Dark Interstage (updated)
• Striped Interstage (new)
• Light Interstage (updated)
• Charcoal (new)
• Skylab (new)

Theta Series:

• Ceres (Eyes Turned Skyward Saturn 1C clone) (new)

Fairings:

• Light (new)
• Dark (new)

*Note: you can drop this in to your existing MainSailor folder, as this pack now contains the new structure going forward, however, the dark and light interstage (and associated normal map) are named the same as in previous releases. You may want to delete/rename Interstage_DK.dds, Interstage.dds, and Interstage_NRM.dds from the ORIGINAL Gamma folder as these are color matched to the new theme.

These are the 'high res' versions, in the future, I will be releasing a reduced texture size pack for those with memory management concerns, however at this time I'm not going to keep two branches going during development. This pack also contains two new procedural fairing textures that do not use Firespitter texture switching (which I'm fairly unhappy with, at the moment); the model files are by e-dog and the shape files are from Ravenchant's Gryphon pack. This pack also doesn't include the Ariane-style texture, as I've scrapped it for now for retooling at a future date (was not happy with it in testing.)

Edited March 2, 2016 by MainSailor
Grammars

[Temeter]

How did I miss this? Looks nice a nice pack, thx for your work!

Those textures make building RSS/RO rockets so much more fun ~

Edited March 11, 2016 by Temeter

[MainSailor]

2 hours ago, Temeter said:

How did I miss this? Looks nice a nice pack, thx for your work!

Those textures make building RSS/RO rockets so much more fun ~

Thanks! I haven't really put that much time into promoting the pack, and I've specifically kept it in the Dev Addons section because I'm constantly tweaking it. I did see a big spike in downloads when they added a link to the main pParts thread though. Maybe I'll post in the RSS/RO subreddit too (is that active?)

 

Speaking of RSS/RO, I've become fascinated with the history of early rockets:

I'm making some final tweaks, but these will be available in the beta build shortly. Also did some slight tweaks on the Ceres core.

 

The next one I'm tackling will probably be something like the Vanguard:

 

And also getting back to retooling the Ariane tank.

[Temeter]

Cool stuff, would fit RP-0 campaigns super well! There is an awesome saturn 5 style pack (i think from ferram?), but otherwise not that much in terms of historical textures.

As for subreddits, I didn't even know those existed. Don't seem to be very active. I think the best way to get word of your textures out would be to put some pics on the normal KSP reddit, and to make a post with pics in the RO thread when you get updates out. Think a lot of people would very appreciate some Thor/Able/Juno style stuff!

Edited March 11, 2016 by Temeter

[Phineas Freak]

@MainSailor awesome! It's true, we have several texture packs that cover STS, Saturn, Soyuz but none for the early rockets.

Keep up the good work!

[MainSailor]

20 minutes ago, Temeter said:

Cool stuff, would fit RP-0 campaigns super well! There is an awesome saturn 5 style pack (i think from ferram?), but otherwise not that much in terms of historical textures.

As for subreddits, I didn't even know those existed. Don't seem to be very active. I think the best way to get word of your textures out would be to put some pics on the normal KSP reddit, and to make a post with pics in the RO thread when you get updates out. Think a lot of people would very appreciate some Thor/Able/Juno style stuff!

I only recently got involved with the fringes of RO because I've been playing 6.4x rescales, and there's a little bit of overlap there (played with Real Fuels for like...a week. ). My original textures were built at a time when it seemed everyone was doing replica stuff, but I wanted something different. Now it seems like I want stuff that's a bit more real (if simplified and 'clean'), like the Skylab and these new ones.

The last time I posted a pack on the main KSP subreddit I didn't get a lot of traction, but there's so few pParts users out there compared to other packs (SpaceY, KW, FASA, etc) that you're talking to a fairly limited audience. And I don't have time to do video or gif work like the KSP History guy or a bunch of the other folks on the subreddit.

I will be working on and releasing a few more 'simple' (minimalist) historical-inspired textures coming up, just keep an eye out here.

7 minutes ago, Phineas Freak said:

@MainSailor awesome! It's true, we have several texture packs that cover STS, Saturn, Soyuz but none for the early rockets.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks!

One of the big issues is a lot of the early rockets are just...white. If there's any detail at all it's the fairly common wraparound stripe (Juno, Jupiter, Thor all had a very similar scheme throughout their history.) And the Saturn style checkerboard patterns are already thoroughly covered I think. I also want to stay away from adding text because I know some people would want NASA or United States while others would want Kerbal States, etc; but the bigger issue is I just can't keep text proportional on a texture that is going to change dimensions. I'd rather have no text that stretched or smushed text.

[Phineas Freak]

Some patterns are just too difficult to adapt to a procedural part and have a good result (especially roll type lines). Having said that, do not be discouraged!

(and if you decide not to release them, can we fiile a request to get and use them for personal projects?)

[MainSailor]

Oh hey I could do Diamant too:

2 minutes ago, Phineas Freak said:

Some patterns are just too difficult to adapt to a procedural part and have a good result (especially roll type lines). Having said that, do not be discouraged!

(and if you decide not to release them, can we fiile a request to get and use them for personal projects?)

Which ones would you be interested in? I can take a look.

 

Thinking about a Europa rocket too. Didn't fly successfully in real life, but seeing as how I already have an Eyes Turned Skyward texture I could do that one too.

[Phineas Freak]

To be honest...to all of them. You just nailed these (personal opinion of course).

[MainSailor]

So the odd thing, I think that there was some Thor rockets that had a wraparound stripe, but it was a single stripe that wrapped all the way around:

 

While the Juno/Jupiter style is the inverted V. So I might do one like that as well.

37 minutes ago, Phineas Freak said:

To be honest...to all of them. You just nailed these (personal opinion of course).

Check out the Beta link. I added the two new ones into that: http://bit.ly/MSBeta2 and I'll post when I have new updates.

Also there's an interesting pattern on the Huntsville rocket garden V-2 which I haven't seen (multiple V-stripes.) KSC's rocket garden doesn't have that one.

[CobaltWolf]

That's a Bumper V2, a lot of them had that paint style.

Diamant would be cool, as would the checkerboard on the upper part of the Mercury Redstone.

[MainSailor]

3 minutes ago, CobaltWolf said:

That's a Bumper V2, a lot of them had that paint style.

Diamant would be cool, as would the checkerboard on the upper part of the Mercury Redstone.

I knew there was a name for it from watching Amy's videos, I just couldn't remember it.

 

I think the Redstone alternating zebra stripes are in the pParts main pack already, right? I guess I could do one that matched my colors through.

 

Diamant is now a thing. Stay tuned.

[MrMeeb]

Awesome! I really liked your original more Si-Fi textures, even though they didn't fit with my personal style. I just really liked the superb quality of them. Now I see that you're making some more realistic styles, while maintaining your (very effective) stockalike look, I couldn't be more overjoyed  One of my biggest bugs with pParts is that the textures just don't fit in with other mods, and generally seem a bit bland, but these ones pop nicely and really work with the feeling of KSP. Well done

Is it possible to get a more high-res pack for those of us using 64bit?  

[MainSailor]

Quick update: Diamant and Thor Able wraps, as well as a plain core with rings (I've seen two conflicting images with Diamant having the stripe only on the lower half, and one with the stripe across the whole thing. Choose your own adventure.)

There'll be a quick tweak since the diagonal stripe gets cut off a little where it meets the horizontal one, I think that's happening during some kind of resize in the DDS conversion since it's not like that in the source file.

13 minutes ago, MrMeeb said:

Awesome! I really liked your original more Si-Fi textures, even though they didn't fit with my personal style. I just really liked the superb quality of them. Now I see that you're making some more realistic styles, while maintaining your (very effective) stockalike look, I couldn't be more overjoyed  One of my biggest bugs with pParts is that the textures just don't fit in with other mods, and generally seem a bit bland, but these ones pop nicely and really work with the feeling of KSP. Well done

Thanks man! Yeah, that seems forever ago now. The only ones I personally use in that pack anymore are the interstage ones, part of the reason I separated them out into the Essentials pack.

I didn't really consider these to be stockalike, I think some of the stockalike textures have a little bit too much grunge or wear/scratching on them, but that's subjective. I do prefer minimalism for these though. The issue I have with some textures (RaiderNick's come to mind) is while they are phenomenally, almost photorealistically detailed, they don't 'mesh' well with stock parts. That's not to say they're poorly done - they're fantastic. They just don't match the parts I play with (these days, mostly stock with Ven's.)

17 minutes ago, MrMeeb said:

Is it possible to get a more high-res pack for those of us using 64bit?  

Wow and here I was thinking they were already too big! Most of the new ones are 1024 x 1024. Are you seeing image quality issues with them at that size? I could potentially export them in higher resolution (although KSP internally will tend to start compressing them after a certain size anyhow.) Since everything is pretty much vector in source, they could be exported extremely high res. With pParts, most of the issues come in stretching. I was already thinking about making a 'tall' interstage for personal use (2048 tall x 1024 wide instead of square like they are now.)

[MrMeeb]

26 minutes ago, MainSailor said:

Wow and here I was thinking they were already too big! Most of the new ones are 1024 x 1024. Are you seeing image quality issues with them at that size? I could potentially export them in higher resolution (although KSP internally will tend to start compressing them after a certain size anyhow.) Since everything is pretty much vector in source, they could be exported extremely high res. With pParts, most of the issues come in stretching. I was already thinking about making a 'tall' interstage for personal use (2048 tall x 1024 wide instead of square like they are now.)

Tbh, I've not had time to play with them juuuust yet, and I don't really have a sense of scale when it comes to textures. I just saw how you're thinking of reducing texture size and panicked  I think a tall interstage would be a good idea though

[MainSailor]

19 minutes ago, MrMeeb said:

Tbh, I've not had time to play with them juuuust yet, and I don't really have a sense of scale when it comes to textures. I just saw how you're thinking of reducing texture size and panicked  I think a tall interstage would be a good idea though

Heh no problem. Those are 2.5m by I think 7-8 meters tall, and with textures set to full in KSP settings, they look sharp. I know that I have used the Ceres stage (the orange with the checker pattern) as high as 7m and it holds up pretty well.

The big reduction was just changing the DDS conversion method to reduce file size, not texture dimensions. I am planning a reduced dimension size pack, but that would be an additional pack primarily for those concerned with memory usage (folks with under 4gb, etc.) Although with DTL and 1.1 coming soon I don't know that I will pursue that.

 

Beta Build is now updated with Diamant, Thor Able, Jebstar (Juno/Jupiter Stripe), and Corestar (Juno-ish lower section.)

 

Looking at Europa next but that pattern is making my head hurt already:

 

Edit: I don't like the way this combines posts.

Edited March 11, 2016 by MainSailor

[MainSailor]

New Vanguard, Redstone, and Checkerboard textures added, updated Thor stripe with the same detail Diamant texture has. Added Delphi (Delta II) blue texture as well.

These are all now in the Beta Build zip.

 

[ThorBeorn]

Hi. I just downloaded the beta textures. Very nice job!

[MainSailor]

7 hours ago, ThorBeorn said:

Hi. I just downloaded the beta textures. Very nice job!

Thanks!

 

I'm still working on Europa, that should be coming out sometime this week. I'm also still seeing a hairline where the texture doesn't wrap correctly on the Jebstar stripes that I will try to fix and update today.

[MrMeeb]

I'm really enjoying the textures! One thing though...

Is it possible to get a conic fairing and egg shaped fairing for you pFairings textures. They're really nice (and I'd love more *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*), but the shape is a bit awkward for some uses  

[MainSailor]

On 3/15/2016 at 4:41 PM, MrMeeb said:

I'm really enjoying the textures! One thing though...

Is it possible to get a conic fairing and egg shaped fairing for you pFairings textures. They're really nice (and I'd love more *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*), but the shape is a bit awkward for some uses  

More like the original PFairings shapes? I think I could put something together like that. In the meantime, the original Gamma ones are still up at http://bit.ly/fairingbeta, but those are the ones that require Firespitter and I'm not super happy with how they came out.

Actually, come to think of it, I might be able to just write a new config that uses the new textures and defines the new parts with the shape definitions from the pFairings shapes.

Edited March 19, 2016 by MainSailor
Added photo