Glock20, 10mm revisited

[Mikademius]

Hello there. Haven't been here for a while.
Some of you might remember that I made a highpoly glock20 a while back.

(For those of you who haven't seen it:)

(Video:)

I want to use this weapon as a test compiling it for a test mod My brother and I are working on. It's not really a mod, but we just created one to try stuff out.

Since I have the old glock model I can use it for reference creating this one. This works great. So far I only have the slide done (or at least almost done. Nothing is optimized yet, but I try to keep the polycount as low as possible.)

Modeling lowpoly is a new experience for me so I'm probably going to need some inputs and ideas later. Here are some images of the slide so far.

Sorry for the quality of the images, but I'm in a hurry...

Also, if someone can point me to any resources when it comes to rigging and animating first person weapons I'd be a very happy man. I've been searching for it for a while.

I'd also like to thank stormy for a good tutorial on modeling for games Look forward to trying out the texturing.

 

[Mikademius]

Here's a litte update. Nothing much, just a couple of hours work. No optimizing and no soft normals yet. Tri cound is just above 1200 somewhere.

 

[MorganFreeman911]

Really very nice. I hope it works out!

 

[Mikademius]

Thanks.
Look forward to animating this baby and getting it ingame.

 

[JNightshade]

Holy shit. Glock 20's are the sexiest guns ever. 15 rounds of 10mm? Hell yes.

 

[Mikademius]

10mm hollow ftw

The glock is nearly finished. I have been playing a bit with smoothing groups(max users) / soft normals (Maya users.) and just modeling all the missing parts. What I do miss is the clip itself so the gun is almost there, but it lacks the clip to hold it bullets. Here are a couple of images to keep you hungry:

Polycount:
- Faces: 680
- Tris: 1676

I don't want to optimize it before I do the animation because then I'll know which faces I can- and cannot delete. Therefore I won't uv map or texture it until I've tried it in source. I will just assign a default grey texture to test it out.

 

[Qonfused]

Looking awesome.

 

[Mikademius]

Thx

 

[JNightshade]

If you play CS:S, might I recommend you compile this for the desert eagle (or even USP)? :E

 

[Mikademius]

If I compiled it for CSS as a replacement for the deagle, wouldn't VAC catch it as a cheat?

A small update tonight. I might sit down and do some rigging, but it's really getting late. I have an image and I also have a short animation with the HL2 DM combine stick. Just for fun. I was just trying to get the model imported and voila. I could not resist Techsmith codec needed to view it. Take a look, it's a bit funny. I was a bit surprised browsing the gcf file 'cause in the models folder I could not find all the weapons. Only physcannon and a couple more. What did I miss? usp hidden somewhere or what?

VIDEO:

http://www.final3.com/images/glock20/ah_stickhit.avi

 

[Mikademius]

Tonight I have read all the QC articles over at developer.valvesoftware.com to get a better understanding of how the QC files work. I have also been decompiling a couple of VALVe's own models to get an idea of how many frames a reload, firing etc. would use. It was actually a bit funny that the USP has just above 800 tris while my glock has 1800. However, when I optimize it I'll get rid of a lot of triangles.

To my big surprise the animations are rather unaccurate and not really that good when it comes to penetrations and lack of moving parts. (trigger, clip release etc. etc.). What's interesting though is that I didn't realize this before decompiling the models to get a frame by frame view in maya... So VALVe had me convinced. I guess that animations done in so few frames passes the "test" our eyes give them.

Now that I am going to animate I'd like to stress that everything is 100% correct though.

Hey, look who's checking out my gun!

 

[morgs]

I like the look of it, nice job.

 

[Mikademius]

Thank you. Now let's get her rigged up

 

[Mikademius]

Rigged. video below. I'm working on exporting, compiling and such now.

http://www.final3.com/images/glock20/rigCapture.avi (techsmith codec required.)

 

[Mikademius]

Ok... So I've created a die just to try things out. I have a better understanding of how stuff works now and where I'm supposed to put the files There are some heavy switching back and forth to get this working. See, my problem now is that I do not get it working. Therefore I'll post the qc and vmt file here so maybe one of you smartheads can see what's wrong

die.qc:

$modelname "die/die.mdl" 
$scale 1.0
$staticprop
$body "Body" die.smd
$surfaceprop "metal"
$cdmaterials "materials/die" 
$sequence idle "die.smd" fps 15 ACT_IDLE 1

my die.smd is located in the same folder as the qc file. My mdl model end up here:

D:\games\valve\SteamApps\username\half-life 2\hl2\models\die

I have my die.tga here:

D:\games\valve\SteamApps\username\sourcesdk_content\hl2\materialsrc\die

Dropping it on vtex creates a vtf and adds it here:

D:\games\valve\SteamApps\username\half-life2\hl2\materials\die

I've also tried here:

D:\games\valve\SteamApps\username\half-life2\hl2\materials\die

My vmt is also located there and looks like this:

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
      "$basetexture" "die\die"
}

I'd appreciate it if someone just took a quick look here to try and spot something obvious while I keep on kompiling

I'd like to point out that the model DO show up in the model viewer. It just seems like I have some textures issues

Another note:
I'm reading through the readme for Prall's exporter for maya (http://mitglied.lycos.de/prallvamp/hl2exp2.5readme.txt)
and it seems like the exporter is a bit vulnerable when it comes to exporting the phong material and creating the material files. It's a bit strange though because I've tried to actually do this process manually. Well, I guess I'll continue reading the help files hehe

 

[Shinobi]

nice job man, that's a good look on seeing it all the way through

 

[Mikademius]

Thanks man. As I said on the last page I'm currently testing out exporting a die just to get used to all the paths. I got a tip that "LightmappedGeneric" probably caused my error compiling my model right. When I get that right I can continue on the glock

 

[Mikademius]

Ok. Figured it out thanks to erykgecky over at iwannamap.com
Here the die is working perfectly in the modelviewer and in hammer:

Now back to understanding what went wrong with the glock

 

[Shinobi]

Thanks man. As I said on the last page I'm currently testing out exporting a die just to get used to all the paths. I got a tip that "LightmappedGeneric" probably caused my error compiling my model right. When I get that right I can continue on the glock

yeah never use lightmappedgeneric for anything that's not a brush in hammer..


you need vertexlitgeneric or unlitgeneric

 

[Mikademius]

Figured that one out after some trying.

You're probably tired of me jumping around not doing anything to the glock at the moment. BUT, I do not want to go crazy with the clock before I know the exporter and the theory behind all this! After 5 days of fiddling (even though the die worked somehow, the export didn't go that well. We had to do it the haxy way which I don't like. I want to know why what does what and now I do)
The exporter is very picky when it comes to project folders and after hours and hours trying to get this to work I found some tutorials that helped me manage through this. FINALLY! So I made this prop after a photo I took a while back. This box was hanging on a telephone pole and I thought it looked so "half life-ish" I just had to take a photo. I think it was a nice object to use as further testing

The Maya exporter is EXTREMELY powerful. It actually creates the SMDs you want, creates the vmts, creates the QC file (custom attributes may be appended to it before it exports, great!) and it also compiles everything so you don't have to drop anything anywhere. Although, knowing the theory behind it is a plus

Now I'll spend some time understanding the animation export part of the script so I can start doing some real work. It's been frustrating, but very rewarding to do all this testing this week.

 

[Mikademius]

Ok. I managed to get the glock even though the vtf export directly from maya failed. I had to do the texture part manually. At least I feel safe about animation now so therefore I'll start animating some sequences like shoot, reload, draw and holster. I'll come back with some animations for you when they're done

 

[theholygod]

for creating VTF and VMT files, i strongly suggest you try out VTFEdit:

http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=178#p178

 

[Mikademius]

I have a ps plugin that deals with manual vtf export directly from Photoshop. But I'll check out VTF Edit anyways

 

[Mikademius]

I moved the camera somewhere close and did the shoot animation. Then I'll have to tweak the camera later.
Here is the link to the animation(techsmith codec):
http://www.final3.com/images/glock20/v_glock20_shoot.avi

Here's how it was set up in Maya:

 

[Stieffers]

You'll want to move the camera to the origin and then change its FOV to I believe 65. That's the FOV used for viewing first person weapon models in Source. From there you should move your entire rig into view, as opposed to moving the camera. That way when you export it you shouldn't have to fiddle with the position in the QC file.

 

[Mikademius]

Hi Stieffers.

I believe the smd's taken from HL2 appears differently in Maya. In XSI it looks like they are imported so the camera should be placed in origo. In Maya the rig is placed so the camera should be placed 68 units in the Y axis. Focal is set to 54 while the source engine renders 75 or close to 75, can't remember exactly

 

[Stieffers]

Source may have a default FOV of 75, but the first person weapon models have a focal view of 54.

 

[Kula Meenur]

Very nice