[Solved] Strange lighting effect in VAB

[Quiznos323]

When I have my part in the VAB it creates a weird shadow effect that only shows up on the half of the part facing the VAB door. Also some of the edge smoothing is lost on the tubing around the bells and the cylinders under the engine. All appears normal when in game though. Any idea what is causing this? I only have the texture set as KSP/Diffuse in Unity atm, since I still have some texturing work to do.

Another thing I noticed is that the grey bits (text, creases, etc.) seem to be a bit washed out and pink-ish...is this due to the MBM format?

Edited February 7, 2015 by Quiznos323

[bac9]

For the first issue, no idea, but make sure you don't have Kronal Vessel Viewer installed, it can cause similar issues.

For the second issue, those are DXT compression artifacts and they are completely unavoidable no matter the source format. The game is not using your textures at runtime, be it MBM, PNG or TGA - instead, everything is converted to DXT format understood by your GPU, and that format has lossy compression.

[Quiznos323]

For the first issue, no idea, but make sure you don't have Kronal Vessel Viewer installed, it can cause similar issues.

For the second issue, those are DXT compression artifacts and they are completely unavoidable no matter the source format. The game is not using your textures at runtime, be it MBM, PNG or TGA - instead, everything is converted to DXT format understood by your GPU, and that format has lossy compression.

Ok, I don't have Kronal Vessel Viewer installed so that wouldn't be what's doing it...so I'm at a loss as to what is. I'm pretty sure I did everything in Unity/texturing the same as previous parts. I'll put it into another KSP install and see if it does the same thing. And I guess I will just have to live with the texture compression since I can't help it, like you said xD

Edit: Installed into a new KSP and it is still doing it, so idk what is happening.. It seems as though the shadows cast by artificial light sources are not fading correctly, and instead create a very firm line. It does the same with the light on the tower on the launch pad, and parts that emit light, but the shadows from the sun seem to be perfectly fine.

Edit 2: I fixed the issue by re-importing my mesh with the setting "calculate normals" instead of "import normals" and now it looks fine. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what in the heck was causing it, but that little detail was what fixed it. So, tip for everyone who happens to read this, make sure you calculate normals on import, else suffer weird shadows and buggy spec maps like I did haha.

Edited February 7, 2015 by Quiznos323