Open Source Part Dare 3

[passinglurker]

To paraphrase frizzank who started the first such contest on the forum...

The idea is simple. Each round a host will post a SIMPLE part idea or challenge for people to work on. During that time you post your work in progress, ask questions, help others and learn how to integrate your creations in-game from start to finish. The difference is your going to post your source art (preferably a unity package) so others can learn from it and discuss how you did what you did. The whole process is open to everyone, so if you don't know anything, that's great you can learn! If you are already a pro then you can help others and show off some of your work.

• Everything is open. The licensing is up to you (if others can use your stuff) but you must post your source art (as a unity package), screen shots, your finished in-game part with its .cfg and license.txt (if others can use your stuff) packaged in a .zip file so others can learn from what you did. It's not just showing off, it's helping others learn.
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  Include a picture in your final forum post submission. at the the end we will hold a vote to see what submission the forum likes best in order to pick who gets to pick the next willing host(yes you can pick yourself that's what I did afterall) and you know what they say "No pics no clicks".
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• You will use constructive criticism only!
  We are here to learn and to teach, not to put people down. I am not a moderator but I can ban people from the contest that are rude or unhelpful with their comments.
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• You will be open to critiques and constructive criticism of your work.
  If you are unclear on what those words mean look them up, but you will not take constructive critiques of your work personally.
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• The schedule for this round starts today Monday MST and goes for as long as it takes to get a decent number of submissions(don't worry you'll be given fair notice when I start thinking about wrapping things up). At the end we will take the final submissions and put them in a new thread in the release subforum to be voted on for a week. The winner of that vote gets to pick the next host(possibly them selves) and that host gets to pick the next theme/challenge/simple part idea. You cant win twice in a row, but you can win more than once.
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• If you are the next hosy and picking the next challenge.
  
  1. the challenge must be completeable with a single part
     
  2. Be simple enough for beginners to make (The Apollo capsule IVA is *NOT* simple)
     
  3. Be open enough that people can get fancy if they wish
     

  So far we've found presenting a challenge in the form of a problem that needs fixing works best but who knows this is only the 3rd round maybe you could make another way work just as well

This weeks Challenge is Probes

Basically with Squads new SAS autopilot feature you find that you no longer pick which probe core to use based on which form factor is most convenient or aesthetically pleasing to you instead its all about its level of SAS even if you find its hexagonal shape to clash terribly with your probes round cylindrical rocket body. So what we need to fix this is more probes in more shapes and sizes with varying levels of SAS. So basically go crazy and make the probe you wished you had when playing career. Here's an example...

Click the picture for the download link (and yes kip I know its not a very good texture I was on a time crunch maybe if we get more than 4 submissions this round I'll take some time during the voting week to spiff it up some more maybe make some alternate textures with different games we'll see )

For Your Convince

Here's a list of the various stock probe form factors sorted by their SAS level

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Stayputnik(spherical, no top, .625 bottom)

Probodobodyne OKTO(octagonal, .625 top, .625 bottom)
Probodobodyne QBE(square, .625 top, .625 bottom)

Probodobodyne HECS(hexagonal, .625 top, .625 bottom)

Probodobodyne OKTO2(octagonal, .625 top, .625 bottom)

RC-L01 Remote Guidance Unit(cylindrical, 2.5 top, 2.5 bottom)
RC-001S Remote Guidance Unit(cylindrical, 1.25 top, 1.25 bottom)
MK2 Drone Core("MK2-shaped", MK2 top, MK2 bottom)

Also links to all the previous part making contests/learning workshops

Previous Open Source Part Week threads

Week 1 discussion

Week 1 voting

Week 2 discussion/voting

Inspiring Open Part Mod threads

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

And of course here's a link to the development links compilation thread in case you missed that sticky on the way in.

And Finally here is a link to the #KSPModders irc WARNING: Be respectful and patient. They are not gonna let us keep linking to them if we send a bunch of entitled whiners their way. don't get frustrated if you ask for help with a problem and get ignored, and remember its an irc so web surfers discretion is advised, off topic chat may be inappropriate for young minds, you've been warned etc etc... all the scary red text aside a live chat is a great place for advice and can sometimes help you get over a hurdle just make sure you report the good advice you pick up back here so others can learn too.

Edited January 12, 2015 by passinglurker

[Camacha]

I do not play career, so I do not have a clue what parts would be missing or not.

[hoojiwana]

I do not play career, so I do not have a clue what parts would be missing or not.

You could simply make a probe with a new shape you want. Maybe you want a 3.75m probe? Maybe you want a probe with built in RTGs? Doesn't have to just be different SAS modes, you can do whatever you think you're capable of.

[passinglurker]

I do not play career, so I do not have a clue what parts would be missing or not.

You could simply make a probe with a new shape you want. Maybe you want a 3.75m probe? Maybe you want a probe with built in RTGs? Doesn't have to just be different SAS modes, you can do whatever you think you're capable of.

As hoojiwana said you can just make whatever shape you want we are not actually trying to fill all the shape,and SAS holes in the part catalog in a coordinated fashion so don't worry if your probe is the same size or shape as someone else's or even stock's (btw a new mesh for an existing texture or a new texture for an existing mesh are both legal submissions)

That being said knowing what holes are filled would still be a convenient thing to know so I added a list to the first post along with other convenient links.

Edited January 12, 2015 by passinglurker

[WolfgangAxel]

When will the deadlines be for this round? Is it only going to be one week or until a certain number of submissions are in or what?

Also, I've never even thought about doing anything like this before. This whole "contest" really got me intrigued. I've got my probe core modeled and (terribly) textured, and at this point I'm just attempting to understand Unity. I haven't been taking any progress screenshots or anything of the sort but if that's strongly recommended for entries then I could take it apart and make a summary of what I've done.

[passinglurker]

When will the deadlines be for this round? Is it only going to be one week or until a certain number of submissions are in or what?

The deadlines are very much up in the air right now previous rounds started with a deadline of one week and extended hoping to give people more time to make submissions even if they discovered the contest later in the week this evidently didn't work cause the contest at the time was called "open source part week" so people still assumed it was only a week long and that either they must have missed the dead line, or there wasn't enough time left to make anything worth submitting. So for this round to fix this I changed the contests name and said up front that the dead line is "as long as it takes", but you can work assured that when I decide to start wrapping things up you'll be given adequate notice in advance that may be accompanied by questions of how much time you feel you need to finish(though I'm not gonna to delay the voting so someone can make a whole parts pack or something crazy like that) All that being said though I hope to have the submissions in and the voting thread up by February at the latest, but again the deadline regardless of my personal feelings is presently "as long as it takes" maybe someday this'll be popular enough to pull off a 1 week deadline but we are presently a long way from that.

Also, I've never even thought about doing anything like this before. This whole "contest" really got me intrigued. I've got my probe core modeled and (terribly) textured, and at this point I'm just attempting to understand Unity. I haven't been taking any progress screenshots or anything of the sort but if that's strongly recommended for entries then I could take it apart and make a summary of what I've done.

Not everyone has time to break down what they're doing and give a complete dev journal so its not a requirement that being said sharing even a portion of your progress, questions, pitfalls, solutions, and generally more thab just your final product would be beneficiary to everyone as you could wind up sharing a solution to a problem some one else is haveing, or someone can recognize a problem you are having and give you a solution, and of course if you share your work's in progress people can give you feedback on how to improve it beyond a purely functional level and make it look nice, and to top it all off the conversation would help keep the thread bumped and visible thereby helping the contest pick up some steam, but that being said documenting everything you could be time consuming everyone should understand that and therefore won't judge you if you choose to not to take it apart to grab screens of you putting it back together. You can if you want it would be cool or you could just start documenting from where you are now, or not at all, or anywhere in between its your choice and you won't get any rage from others over whatever you choose. Just keep in mind the more detail you provide the more beneficial it is to people who are using the contest as motivation to learn to mod and to people who would provide you with advice and feedback.

[WolfgangAxel]

Thanks for the feedback! I think my night just opened up so I'll probably go back and take a few shots of what all I've done. At the very least I'd like to help bump the thread.

[WolfgangAxel]

I had every intention to at least post something last night. I had a post started, then my night became unfreed. I came back to it way later and got about half of it done, but when I went to post it, the forum logged me out and erased my post. I knew it would happen and I did ctrl+c my post, but for whatever reason it didn't actually copy so I lost it.

But that's not really important.

So. My probe idea came about while I was messing around in Blender. I added the cylinder mesh and thought to myself it'd be pretty fun to try to make a brain in a jar probe core. I thought about it a bit and decided that modeling the brain would be tough and textures would be tough. I scrapped the idea and started working on a giant Kerbal head probe core, but the brain idea kept coming back and I couldn't shake it so

To make the brain mesh, I added a UV sphere and used the sculpt tools with symmetry around either X or Y until I had a shape I thought was reasonably identifiable. To make the texture map, I manually selected the polygons in the "stem" and moved them to one corner of the UV map. I then exported the image and started making a placeholder texture in GIMP. All I did was lasso the corner with the stem, make solid noise, and colorize until I got that look. I then inverted my selection and did the same thing for the rest of the brain. It was originally supposed to be placeholder, but I actually kind of like how it turned out so I think I might keep it. There's only a few polygons that seem out of place on the model, which wouldn't take too long to fix in Blender, but I'm more focused on finishing it rather than it looking perfect for the moment.

I had a few issues with texturing the jar at first. This isn't the exact problem I had, but it was pretty similar.

Basically because the textures are one sided, I could see the outer shell of the jar, but looking through the "glass" I couldn't see anything on the inside. My solution for this was just duplicating the cylinder and mapping the inside cylinder to a slightly modified texture. With one cylinder pointing outward and one pointing inward, the problem was fixed and I didn't need to figure out how to add depth to the model and further complicate the texture maps.

And here's the resized texture maps for the jar

So with all the modeling done, I exported and loaded up Unity for the first time. After figuring out the scaling issues, I ran into an issue with the textures not loading properly.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that the problem was the shaders, but once I figured it out and played around with the options a bit, this is the best I could come up with using the KSP shaders:

All in all, I think it's ready to be loaded up into the game. I added the attachment nodes in blender and reoriented them in Unity, so that shouldn't be an issue. For the .cfg file, I just copied the OKTO's file and edited it. I removed the reaction wheels module because there's no space in the jar for reaction wheels to go, but I left the level 0 stability control I think. I also bumped up the power consumption a bit. One thing I really wanted from this probe was the ability to crew report with a transmission penalty, because I figured the brain could observe and record data about it's surroundings, but since it was probably pulled from a dead Kerbal, the ability to relay that information would be hindered. So if you wanted 100% value from the crew report, the probe would have to be recovered, and no more crew reports could be taken. At least in theory.

I'm not sure if a brain in a jar has been done before, but I've never come across one. I was thinking that if I could find time, I'd like to make variants of this design, like a dome/fishbowl design for aerodynamic purposes. But I'm not holding my breath for that to actually happen.

- - - Updated - - -

I loaded my brain into KSP (that's a weird sentence). There must have been an issue with the export from Unity because the transparency wasn't working properly.

When I opened it again in unity, all the shaders got changed to the standard diffuse again so I'm not sure if something happened there but I re-exported with proper shaders and MBM textures and again with PNG textures just to try things out. I don't think I'll have time to boot the game up again until later today, but I should have at least something else to report.

I forgot to make sure the SAS level was right, but at least the crew report thing works.

(Judging from the picture though, the SAS thing didn't work.)

[passinglurker]

Going by the picture it looks like the SAS is working. At lvl0 you don't get the buttons because stability assist is the only mode to choose.

Given that the brain is physically smaller you could get away with a smaller texture for that part. I recall the rule of thumb for textures being around 256x256 pixels of texture space per square meter of mesh to cover, and that's assuming you don't have some UV's overlap and share texture space.

I'm interested to see how it looks in KSP with the transparency working the last transparent tube I saw someone make looked more like a force field and you couldn't see the transparent bit of the part at all in the part catalog tab.

As for the model the metal caps look a bit thin and if they were supporting a window there would be a bit of a lip sticking out.

[RainDreamer]

I think Raster Prop Monitor had something for transparent pods and stuff. Maybe you can look into that.

[nli2work]

I'd do two discs for the top and bottom caps with diffuse/specular shader; then an open ended cylinder for the glass. for glass translucent/specular should work well. you can try the particle shaders too.

[WolfgangAxel]

Going by the picture it looks like the SAS is working. At lvl0 you don't get the buttons because stability assist is the only mode to choose.

Given that the brain is physically smaller you could get away with a smaller texture for that part. I recall the rule of thumb for textures being around 256x256 pixels of texture space per square meter of mesh to cover, and that's assuming you don't have some UV's overlap and share texture space.

I'm interested to see how it looks in KSP with the transparency working the last transparent tube I saw someone make looked more like a force field and you couldn't see the transparent bit of the part at all in the part catalog tab.

As for the model the metal caps look a bit thin and if they were supporting a window there would be a bit of a lip sticking out.

I'm trying to get the transparency under control. I think I'm going to have to go back into Blender and add another cylinder to get everything working right. Combining the glass and the inner lid textures is really causing troubles with the game calculating what is and isn't visible.

I'd do two discs for the top and bottom caps with diffuse/specular shader; then an open ended cylinder for the glass. for glass translucent/specular should work well. you can try the particle shaders too.

I'll definitely try this! I wasn't sure how KSP would handle shaders outside of the PartTools package, so I haven't tried any of those yet. I don't think I'll get the effect I'm going for without adding the open cylinder like you suggested.

The feedback's been really helpful, and thank you all so much for your support!

[nli2work]

I'll definitely try this! I wasn't sure how KSP would handle shaders outside of the PartTools package, so I haven't tried any of those yet. I don't think I'll get the effect I'm going for without adding the open cylinder like you suggested.

For some transparent objects I find KSP's particle shaders give slightly better results. Additive is a little like Translucent/Unlit; and Alpha blended particle shader is a little like standard Translucent. You will probably get best result with 2 nested cylinders with small gap (glass wall thickness), flip the faces on the inside one so the normals point inside.

some Unity shaders will work in KSP. Unity particle shaders will not. there's no real advantage with using Unity shaders over KSP shaders... generally it's better to stick with KSP shaders included with PartTools.

Edited January 14, 2015 by nli2work

[WolfgangAxel]

Thanks to everyone's help and suggestions, I'm very proud to say that my first mod part is operational.

After a lot of fighting with the shaders, I decided that the way I had constructed the probe was not going to allow me to get what I wanted out of the part. With the advice of nli2work, I reopened the project in Blender and scrapped the jar I had and mapped out something a little more eye-appealing:

Figuring out how to make edges/faces really made a difference. Who would've guessed?

At this point I think it's just a matter of balance before I'm officially done with this probe. I switched back to science mode when 0.90 released, so I haven't really experienced how career mode is balanced. I'm thinking I'll leave it in the same node as the OKTO for now, but the costs are subject to change. It's got the level 0 SAS module, but it doesn't come with any reaction wheels, so I'm not sure if that should decrease the price, or if the labor involved with putting a brain in a jar and making it sentient would raise the cost. I figured the core would probably be a bit of a power hog too, but I'm not sold on that idea yet.

My next update post will probably have my unity package, the blender files, and the config file for the probe. In the meantime, have a few extra glory shots while I head to bed.

[passinglurker]

Aesthetically speaking there is still room for improvement depending on how much more time you want to put into it first being if this is a kerbals brain then kerbals must have TARDIS biology because of how big it is compared to their heads. Second the texture for the metal part still looks like it could use some work as some would see basic black more like a cheap cop out than part of a scary brain box. going with a dark shade of grey with a lighter grey airbrushed on the corners to create the look of wear would be a good start. Also an AO bake would be a good thing to toy with. finally I'd recommend including a download of your WIP because I remember having a surprisingly hard time working out how best to package my source art and part towards the end of the last round so I'd say it would be best to start working that out now too.

[WolfgangAxel]

Aesthetically speaking there is still room for improvement depending on how much more time you want to put into it first being if this is a kerbals brain then kerbals must have TARDIS biology because of how big it is compared to their heads. Second the texture for the metal part still looks like it could use some work as some would see basic black more like a cheap cop out than part of a scary brain box. going with a dark shade of grey with a lighter grey airbrushed on the corners to create the look of wear would be a good start. Also an AO bake would be a good thing to toy with. finally I'd recommend including a download of your WIP because I remember having a surprisingly hard time working out how best to package my source art and part towards the end of the last round so I'd say it would be best to start working that out now too.

Yeah I distinctly remember thinking this part would be best as .625m when I first started it, but I didn't think about it when I put that as the radius so it ended up 1.25m. I don't really know why I never corrected that? I guess it just slipped my mind in my excitement of actually seeing my work in-game.

As for the textures, I'm really not that good at anything related to graphics. I'm fairly fluent with GIMP but that doesn't really mean much if I don't have the artistic knowledge to make something look nice. I'll see if I can follow your advice about it looking worn. I'm not even sure what AO bake is but I googled it briefly so I kind of understand what you mean. I'll definitely look into it, but probably not until I fix everything else.

[Orionkermin]

So i sort of started working on something for this. It's still early and I'm not devoting tons of time to it, so i don't know how long it will take, but I wanted to try and help build support for these workshops by at least contributing something.

Anyways, mine is meant to be an early game "rover" probe core. I've only just got the basics modeled and still have to finish the wheel that will go with it. I've designed it to fit inside 1.25m shrouds which should make it use-able in the early game. I'm hoping to give it the ability to take crew and eva reports (justified by those being visual analyses and it having camera equipment built in) that way it can fulfill survey contracts in place of always sending kerbals. It will not have any SAS.

Here's a look at what I have so far. Most of the detail will be handled by the texture.

Edited January 15, 2015 by Orionkermin

[passinglurker]

alright less than a week till the end of the month(not the deadline just saying) is anyone working in secret and has something working enough in game to be tested and be given feedback? Because that sort of talk is really the only way we have to keep this thread bumped.

[seronis]

Love the two i see here. Wish i had artistic skills to try this myself.

[passinglurker]

Love the two i see here. Wish i had artistic skills to try this myself.

Well if you can develop your skills on the technical side of things then a trick to try to fill void in ones skill with photoshop is to map your models UV's to an existing texture (for example one of the SQUAD textures that everyone has) which has the added perk of minimal extra ram usage. Check out Lack's SXT mod to see an example of this.

[a__gun]

After seeing one of the open source parts from week one in a YouTube video and spending ages trying to find out where it came from, I think it would be great if these threads/parts got some more attention.

I get the need to start a new thread with each challenge, but it would be so much easier to find these parts if there was one central thread with all the results and downloads as well as links to the individual challenge threads.

[passinglurker]

After seeing one of the open source parts from week one in a YouTube video and spending ages trying to find out where it came from, I think it would be great if these threads/parts got some more attention.

I get the need to start a new thread with each challenge, but it would be so much easier to find these parts if there was one central thread with all the results and downloads as well as links to the individual challenge threads.

the problem is you would need someone to hang around and maintain the "hub thread" since who's in charge changes with each challenge there is no person to easily foist the responsibility on to. Another issue is there is only like two submissions per challenge in the previous weeks this is far from a stockpile of assets where you'd need assistance navigating so I don't see anyone wasting their time with a "hub thread" as opposed to just linking to all the previous threads as I've done until that changes, but if you want to volunteer to start and maintain a hub thread then feel free as long as you respect licences and attribute properly I see no reason to stop you.

But if you really want these to get some more attention then the best possible thing you can do is participate and log your progress and get feedback here to help keep the thread bumped so it doesn't spend 2+ weeks in off the first page forum limbo as if the only people who wanted it didn't want to contribute to it. Which would be a very sad and depressing thought wouldn't you agree?

[WolfgangAxel]

Oh man has it been awhile since I was here last. My classes finally started kicking into gear and it's been busy, so I haven't had a bunch of time to work on this (and the time that was available to work, I usually chose to relax instead).

But anyway!

I redid the textures for the casing like it was suggested so it's not a solid color anymore. The probe has also been resized to 0.625 m, so it's a little more believably-sized now. I also decided that I wanted to add at least one variant model. I ended up using the same textures for it, but I don't think it's entirely necessary to have separate textures for these. With all that out of the way, here's the variant model:

It's practically the same as the original model I designed, but it's a little more aerodynamic-looking (haven't tested in FAR to make sure it is), and it only has the bottom connection. I have dubbed it the Thinkin' Kap since it's probably going to "cap" off your probe and yeah.

The partial science transmission is still a thing, along with basic stability control but no reaction wheels.

The original inline design is also an option.

I exported everything into a Unity Package, and hopefully it works? I didn't seem to have any problems with it exporting, but your results may vary I guess.

Feedback is welcome, all that jazz. I still plan to see this contest through to the end!

[SmarterThanMe]

Dead?

[Drakoflame]

Wolfgang, your brain in a jar... I want it... I love it! You know... something that you could maybe do after this is done, and you win because you seem o be the only one who's got something presentable (no offense to the others who have something, but he's got ingame pictures), Maybe you could add another part that's a little eyeball sort of thing that can work with RPM's external camera, but it it can also do an EVA report because, its an eye! Or maybe instead of adding the eyepart, you can have an upgraded brain in a jar that has eyes that float around, allowing you to do EVA reports