Prepping for KSP - ballisticfox/MapTheEarth-KSP GitHub Wiki

This is the 5th tutorial in the series and meant for both US and non-US datasets.

Once again to create this I will be following my process that I followed for developing the Vandenberg Spaceforce Base, tile n35w121.

Requirements:

Setting up textures

Now that we have a heightmap and a colormap we can move onto actually prepping the model and textures for KSP.

Open your color map and flip it vertically, export as .dds with DXT1 compression and mipmaps.
Open your heightmap, scale it to the same size as your color map.
Set your colormap's mode to RGB instead of grayscale
Flip your heightmap vertically.
Filters>Generic>Normal Map, I typically use a strength of 240.
export as dds with dxt5nm and mipmaps
Open your heightmap
Scale to 1024x1024
Flip vertically
Export with no compression, L8 format, no mipmaps.

These are all the textures we'll need, time to apply them.

Open your .blend, add a new material to the mesh, scroll down to the Mu Shader tab. Select ksp bumped from the list.

Open the textures drop down, you should see _Maintex and _Bumpmap

To load the textures themselves open a image editor window and do Image>Open, load in both your color map and normal map, the height isn't needed.

In the Mu Shader tab where it says Name: _MainTex and it has a box below it with gray, copy the name of your colormap in replacement of gray, then tick the second box.

Next select _BumpMap and replace bump with the name of your normal map, then tick the first and second boxes.

Going into material preview our shading appears black, this is due to a bug and can be fixed by opening the shader editor and deleting the Color Attribute node.

Our texture will appear flipped for now but after exporting it will be flipped properly.

That's all for the texture set up!

Preparing our mesh

Your vert count is still probably over 65534 at this point so add another decimate to cut that down, I typically use 0.75 for the ratio.

If your mesh has water it's best to remove those vertices

Shade Smooth your mesh.

Going around the edges of your mesh you’ll notice large walls and overhangs, it’s best to go into edit mode and remove these.

Add an empty, name it the coordinates of your mesh, parent the plane to the empty and name the plane the coordinates followed by -terrain.

Apply all transforms to the mesh.

That's all you need for the .mu! Click the empty then export it as a KSP-Mu.

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