Before we start texturing, it’s not a bad idea to set up the material and KSP shader you’ll be using for this. Ideally, you’ll want one material for the entire part, working off one UV map and one set of textures.

Taniwha’s plugin adds shader options that are lifted from the game, letting us configure the settings and with a (if somewhat inaccurate and crude) preview in Blender’s rendering mode.

Creating a KSP Shader

Create a new material that is applied to all the meshes of the part. Underneath the typical material settings, you will find a new section called “Mu Shader”, where the in-game shader settings are configured. Below is an example of a material setup for an engine named the Swallow:

Relevant settings are:

• The Shaders drop-down should be set to ksp emissive bumped specular. Specular is for shininess control, bumped lets us use a normal map, and emissive lets us create engine (over)heating effects.
• Name doesn’t matter much, but I like setting it to the same name as the Blender material name.
• _MainTex is our diffuse/specular texture. Its Name should match that of the texture file (e.g., if the texture file in the GameData folder will be called MESwallowC.dds, I will set this to MESwallowC).
• _Emissive and _BumpMap are our emissive and normal map textures. Similarly to _MainTex, their names should match the filenames of your emission and bump map textures.
• In the case of _BumpMap, make sure the first box for “type” is checked! Otherwise you’ll end up with strange normals flipping on one half of your exported model.

• _Shininess is pretty-self explanatory. For an engine like this we usually have it set to somewhere around 0.05 to 0.10.