Wall Worm Forums

Okay so I'm making a snow level and wish to use the blend texture in 3DS Max.  After seeing Shawn demonstrating it in his displacement tutorial i knew i simply had to get used to it.

Is it okay to switch from 'Standard' to 'Blend' or will that not work?  I had seen 'DirectX Shading' floating around in the documentation but I'm not quite sure why I'd have to use this and furthermore how to even use it as a blend texture.

I suppose that i could just use trial and error but I'd rather hear it from the horses mouth so to say, rather than wasting valuable time trying to get it to work.

Thanks!

But i don't check Specular Colour anyway and it still does it.  I only enable Specular Level.

**This is for Counter Strike: Global Offensive**

Okay so i made a model of a safe but envmap doesn't give a dull enough reflection so I've decided to go with $Phong.  Here's an example of the sort of "sheen" i wish to have on the metal texture (yes i know it's wood in this picture but you get the idea)

As you can see it's not super reflective but has a mild glossiness to it which is what I'm looking for, and i believe that can't be done with envmaps.

Below i shall list my workflow of how i believe i should be doing it but maybe I'm missing something:

1.  Set shader type from Blinn to Phong.  Made sure WWMT is implemented into the material editor
2.  Put my diffuse texture (main texture) into the 'Diffuse' slot.
3. Put my normal map (that has an alpha channel for the Phong to work with) into the 'Bumpmap' slot.
4.  Done the same as in step 3 but this time for the Specular Level slot.
5.  Not touched anything else in the WWMT parameters to be on the safe side.
6.  Exported the textures (for some reason the .VMT exporter wont even do anything from within the material editor)

This is the resulting .VMT file, but for some reason it still reads as using an envmap AND Phong yet there seem to be a few Phong parameters missing:

"VertexLitGeneric"
{

   "$model" 1
   "$phongboost" "1.0"
   "$phongfresnelranges" "[0 0.5 1]"
   "$surfaceproperty" "Metal_Box"

    $basetexture "textures/Phong_test_1"
    $envmap "env_cubemap"
    $envmapmask "textures/phong_test_1_s"
}

So could somebody possibly tell me what I'm doing wrong?  Shawn has tried to help me and I'm sure, from his end, his explanation works but for me something just isn't going right and i end up with an envmap as well as a Phong shader.

Sorry if I've been asking a lot of questions but I've started to make notes of the ones that yield the best results and possible solutions, so that i have them to reference to in the future.

Ah okay thanks man I'll look into it after dinner  :)  Does it need to be the alpha channel of anything or can i just use one created separately?  If it needs to be the alpha channel then i can just use the bumpmap alpha or?  I'm assuming i could just use it in a multi-sub/object?

Also what's the command to make it work in-game?  GMod doesn't auto-do it and i forgot the command i need to put into dev console xD

Okay I've noticed that if you export your model first and THEN the texture, the texture won't work in the engine.  I've now come to realize that you must export the texture first and then the model, in that order.

I didn't think it really mattered but now i know otherwise so i just thought I'd mention it in case anybody else runs into the same issue.

Do i still need to do it the old way by manually setting up the .VMT orcan you do it within WWMT now?  It's been a long time since I've made phong shaders but i always thought that the .VMT used the alpha channel of the bumpmap?

I watched the tutorial but it doesn't really talk about phong textures  :o  The exporter doesn't even recognize 'Specular Color' yet that's the thing needed to make phong shaders apparently.

THANKS!

So this is something that i've been pondering a lot lately:

Is making modular content good or bad for a typical Source map?  I'm just talking about things like buildings that you can't walk into and things like that.

I know that you can do it on an older engine very similar to it (GTKRadiant) which was around the same time as HL1 and you can do it for that but how about this?

So basically for things like scenery buildings are prefabs/modulars better than brushes?

Thanks!

As a long time modder or Source i wouldn't mind xD

Quote from: wallworm on October 26, 2013, 12:19:48 AM
Well certainly share your journey here when you've figured it all out. It will certainly help others.

I'd still like to be able to do this with WallWorm but my main problem is that i don't know what i need to inject into the .QC file.  I mean i have the "template" .QC for the player model but i don't know what to take from it xD

Anyway i found that in order to use the animations from the game you want to make the player model for, you need to have said animations to begin with like:

$includemodel humans/male_shared.mdl
$includemodel humans/male_ss.mdl
$includemodel humans/male_gestures.mdl
$includemodel humans/male_postures.mdl

For me, and probably others, by default these folders weren't on my hard drive so the compile continued to fail.  So, in this case, i needed the humans for use in DeathMatch, to be in my modelsrc folder, in my case situated at:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\myusername\half-life 2 deathmatch\hl2mp\models

So once i had extracted the humans folder into that directory, the .QC then actually had something to work with.

I may make a tutorial today as there really don't seem to be any decisive ones out there.  Might make it include rigging a simple character and putting it into the game.

However, as i said, i would like to be able to say that i'm confident in using 3DS Max/WWMT to do this as that is my first port of call when it comes to content creation.

Quote from: wallworm on October 24, 2013, 03:55:58 PM
I'm pretty busy with work at the moment. When I get time I'll detail the process.

The best bet in the meantime is experimentation.

Well i managed to get it working, apparently it was missing a folder i had to extract from a GCF, only problem is now the texture wont work.  I think i'll try to do it with WWMT next to see if it works  :D

I spent all day trying to work it out, i even tried doing it the old ways using stupid studiocompile whatever it's called.

Whenever i try to inject:

$includemodel humans/male_shared.mdl
$includemodel humans/male_ss.mdl
$includemodel humans/male_gestures.mdl
$includemodel humans/male_postures.mdl

^^^^These seem to point to things that don't even exist?  I was following a tutorial by NOESIS which may also explain why it refuses to compile in studiocompiler.  I may also be having issues since the pipeline update because things don't seem to work as i remember.

Into the .QC of the player for DeathMatch, HLMV crashes but without it there's no animations at all.  I really want to try and get a decent or moderately stable workflow going between WWMT and Source when it comes to making player models.  Once i get it working i intend to make a Youtube tutorial teaching people how to do it.

I've compiled the model to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Half-Life 2 Deathmatch\hl2mp\models\humans_sdk\Male\Group03m.

I know i've asked for help already but this is driving me crazy, and since nobody has really tried to compile a player model using WWMT i'd really like to sort it out so i can see if it even works or if i'm doing something wrong.

Could somebody please post what i'd need to inject into the .QC for it to use DeathMatch animations so i can at least try trial and error?

I also noticed that K@RT had made a 'tank' model and put it into Source via WWMT so ummm yeh lol.

Well usually that's created when you run the game for the first time or SDK or even HAMMER usually.  Normally when you start HAMMER (located in your games Bin directory in this case CSS) it'll tell you that you don't have a gameinfo.txt, this can be located in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Counter-Strike Source\cstrike

Copy the gameinfo.txt and paste it into:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Counter-Strike Source\bin

Now from that same folder try to run HAMMER again and it should load... Close HAMMER down and see if it created a GameConfig for CStrike.

If not i guess i could give you mine and you just put that in there instead?


By the way i'm not even sure if you make models FOR GMod so to say... I've found that i just make them for another game like CSS and then load them into GMod because GMod kinda grabs models from other games mainly and doesn't really have any of its own (i think)
If you notice, GMod doesn't even have a folder for models and such so i've always just made them for Source or whatever and then loaded them in GMod from the list.

I really loved this game, probably the only BF game i did enjoy xD

No problem enjoy!   :)

Heya! In your GMod Bin directory make a new text file called GameConfig.txt

Open it up using noted then go to this link and copy all of the text from it and paste it into the file you made:
http://dev.wallworm.com/media/1/text/plain/original/66_gameconfig.txt

Save it and it should now work  :)

***NOTE***
If you have Steam saved on a different drive other than C: then do this:

1.  In Notepad (with your new GameConfig.txt file opened up) click EDIT>REPLACE
2. In the "Find What" type "C: (because this is the drive that this example is using)
3. In the "Replace with" box type the same as above but now replace "C: with the letter  that your drive uses, for example "D: or "E: ,etc.
4. Now click on "Replace All"

This will replace the drive letter in that document to the one you have Steam installed onto.