Blogs - xuehehuapiao

So, I decided to do this to sorta log some struggles and some new content being made. Some of the content may be scrapped, some released, and some kept in a box until it's their time.

Today, I worked on my improved hev addon.

It wasn't extremely hard to make, just a sorta test to see what the response is and a personal addon. The main things I edited were the mesh, textures, and UV maps. The mesh is the player mesh with the helmet. I removed some unneeded vertices and merged some of them to lower the poly count slightly. It won't matter for performance that much, but it's still a good habit to have. A bad habit to have is to not update things. Valve did this for hl1 leaving a lot of the models inconsistent. The difference in the HEV suit hand designs might be due to that, depending on if the concept art was made before the mesh. I fixed this by using the view model hand texture, scaling it down, and editing the hand texture to make it look good. I also fixed the fingers. The HEV suit has sorta a rounded square shape to the knuckle/finger bits and it has 3 of them for each finger and very long one for the thumb. The viewmodel has 2 triangle shaped knuckle/finger bits and its for every single finger. I edited the texture to fix this as well. Valve used software that at the time was ground breaking to make their models, but today isn't really much compared to things like the modern version of if at blender. The software can and was a pain in the ass to work with sometimes. This caused some messed up smoothing on some of the models, the player mesh being one of them. When I first looked at the smoothing I almost had a heart attack. It looked really messy. After further examination though, it wasn't actually that bad. It was only in a few places but all bundled up, as opposed to the usual valve way of it being in many places and there not being as many smoothing errors in each spot. I got to work and finished rather quickly with fixing the smoothing. Now, the HEV suit has seems in the proper locations and overall looks better.

Another thing I worked on today was an improved MP5 model. It's still not done yet, but is definitely on its way there. The first thing I did was rig the default HEV viewmodel arms to the Gearbox animations. I did this by decompiling the Blue Shift MP5 model, then renaming some bones in the HEV viewmodel arms to match them. The reason I renamed some bones instead of rigging it fully because it's easier than fully replacing the skeleton with it and taking hours to get it just right. Most of the bones share the same names, the only different ones being the base of the skeleton, upper arms, and lower arms. The reason I did any of this in the first place is because the Gearbox MP5 reload animation is much better. Next thing on my list was to edit some textures. The first one I edited was the sidemap texture. This one went through many iterations, trying to find the perfect balanced of using upscaled textures, alpha textures, and retail. I ended up upscaling both the alpha and retail textures, adding back some details lost due to the upscaling, and adding the best parts of both. I used the grenade launcher from the alpha, parts of the body, and some of the other textures. I added back parts of the retail MP5 that I think look better/are missing from the alpha MP5. Then I scaled down the texture to the same size as the original texture. This is a strategy I like to use. It makes the textures look better and helps hide some editing, while not being a big texture and not looking out of place compared to the other ones used for different models.

The third thing I'm gonna talk about that I did today was rigging the beta bare handed model from Hl1. In the max file for the gauss animations, there's a hidden object. If you unhide it, it's revealed that it is actually the bare hand model from the HL1 beta in all of it's glory. If you don't know what the bare hand model is (which I will now be referring to as the barehand model), it's a model from the development of half life where the player wore the HEV suit, but lacked the gloves. This is seen in a few screenshots of beta gameplay, the beta gordon model, and multiple places in the Half-Life SDK, such as the aforementioned gauss animation files and the barehand model. The model in the max file has fully done physiques, but no skeleton to match. You could probably recreate the skeleton based on the physique, but I don't know anything about 3ds max. BLENDER TIME. The smd exported I used doesn't export weight groups unless it has a skeleton. If it doesn't have a skeleton, it creates a new bone and rigs the whole thing to that. So, I had to rig it manually. Rigging is an absolute pain. It's a pain I would not even bestow on my worst enemies. It's a pain I want to completely bypass whenever I can. Long story short, after many trials and errors, I just decided to split up the model into separate parts, rig them individually, then weld them back together. Even then, I still messed up on a hand so I'm gonna redo it tomorrow. After that, I made a beta glock model based on the one from the offices video.

Anyways, thats all for today. I might take a break tomorrow (probably not though ;) )