How to go from a naked model to a beautiful gun?

[archvilell]

I have searched far and wide (at least until I got frustrated) for a good tutorial on how to do this, and the results come up bare. I am using XSI Mod Tool 4.2 (one major restriction) and have no texture or anything. I made my own modesl, and they are stitting there in all of their grayness:









I understand the gist of it now: I have to unwrap it, paint on the vertices, then put it back. But how do I do any of this. For simplicity, I'm gonna work on the shotgun first. But other than the fact that the model is done, I have no idea how to even start.

Tutorials (videos especially) would be gladly aprreciated.

 

[evil^milk]

i may suggest exporting it to .3ds, downloading milkshape, and importing and skinning it there. as far as i know you don't have to export or import any uvw map related stuff, just plain skinning (sort of like in hammer, if you've ever been familiar with applying textures to brushes) and it's a lot easier than XSI.

those are really good models btw

 

[archvilell]

Thanks. The top two took forever to do, but the shotgun took about 4-5 hours cumulative. Its pretty much a mishapen box for a reciever and two cylinders.

(Would you believe me if I told you the top set was only my second model in XSI and the shotgun was third?)

How would I go about skinning something in MilkShape? I know less about MilkShape than I do XSI, which is limited to polygonal modeling.

Also, what is the general steps to make something from a model to a HL2 weapon? I know that I'll need animations and coding, but I have no idea how to do anything else.

 

[evil^milk]

basically to get a model ingame, you'll need a qc file (which can be created by using a compiler, included in milkshape), and a few SMD files (smd files can be for animations and references [references = the model itself]).

to learn the process of these things, you have to take for a example an HL2 weapon and decompile it (also in milkshape) and take a look at the qc file (it can be opened in notepad), copy and paste the code to your own weapon's qc file. after that's done, to create the animations, you'd need to assign bones to vertices (or something like that) and then set the origin of the weapon, in other words where your weapon will appear in-game.

it sounds complicated and it sort of is but once you get the hang of it you're set.

about skinning, you first need to import your gun to milkshape by converting your XSI file to OBJ (i guess this is the only thing milkshape supports). i'm still struggling here to get something from xsi to milkshape, but i came across this site:

http://www.cgtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-3215.html

and it may solve that.

once that's done it's time to look at this tutorial:

http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/resources/halflife/tutorials/milkshape3.shtml

and you'll see it's pretty easy to skin. basically in milkshape it consists of assigning a group of polygons to a material (your skin) and aligning it in a property editor. it's quite simple but it takes a lot of messing aorund and examples (going back to decompiling hl2 models and looking at their properties, textures, animations, etc) in order for you to get the hang of it.

of course this is how i do things (and i only have some experience with half-life1 related mods) and there might be some easier form but this works for me and it may work for you also

 

[Hazar]

whoa... thoes models look great

post pics of when you get 'em skinned

 

[thereisaspoon]

dont use milkshape for uv mapping, its horrible. XSI has the best uv mapping tools hands down, and i've tried most.

 

[Twinke Masta]

UV it.

 

[Some0ne]

Would you believe me if I told you the top set was only my second model in XSI and the shotgun was third?

yes i could believe that, but it seems you picked up XSI pretty quickly.

the models r pretty decent

 

[crackhead]

xsi is the best for uv "ing" u need to assign a white texture to it and choose a suitible texture projection you could try cubic while your getting the hang of it. then go to application> views> texture editor. and you should see ur mesh over your skin. then go to stamp uv mesh and save it as a tga. then use this as the texture on your model so that u will see the changes as you make them.

 

[Hazar]

pfft, pendragon is only a memeber :E

and yes, AA is good

 

[archvilell]

Lol, I havent figured out how to get the render to work right, so those are screenshots directly from the workspace.

 

[hellboy900]

What program do you do that with???, where can i get it? and how big is it?

 

[archvilell]

SoftImage XSI Mod Tool 4.2. Directly from SoftImage. It's free. Pretty big download.

 

[hellboy900]

Can you give me a link please.

 

[archvilell]

http://www.softimage.com/products/M...e.com/products/Mod/v42/downloads/software.asp

 

[hellboy900]

Thanks so much...i hope i can use this program and bring some awsome weapon modles.

 

[MonkOnFire]

It's an awesome program, although I suggest you download the trial of 3DS Max as well. Usually weapon modellers are very comfortable with one of these two. Me, I love XSI and think it beats Max hands down. The only thing I prefer about Max is the rendering and the ability to import and export to other formats so easily.