I know some of you are doing HL2 mods, so I have a question.

Has anyone successfully created a character for a Half Life 2 mod in Max and got it working in Hammer? The only exporter I've been able to find is Cannonfodder's Half-Life 2 tools and there's barely any documentation. The only thing it says about the smd exporter is that it, "Supports Character studio and bones pro. Bones pro from digimation will allow multiple joints per vertex (up to 3)". I can understand using CS, but why Bones Pro? It doesn't make any sense. How many people actually own Bones Pro anyway?

And I don't even want to use CS if I can help it. So does anyone know if you can use Max Bones and Skin to create HL2 characters? I don't actually have HL2 or the SDK yet, but from what I've been reading on different forums, a lot of people are asking the same questions. I've only read that there's an exporter for Maya included in the SDK, and then of course there's XSI, but I'd rather not switch programs right now.

Thanks.

Looks like I answered my own question. I found another script by someone to export using bones and skin, but I haven't tested it yet.

Link

Seems strange though, that some random user had to write a script to do something that should have been included in the SDK if Valve was really serious about helping the mod community.

Sounds like there are a lot of unhappy Source modders out there... Unreal vs. Source

What are your guys' experiences with the Source engine and Hammer? I want to start playing with it, but it's not sounding like it's going to be a pleasant experience. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

Well, when the SDK was released, the list of items included in it on Steam's "Update News" window included "3d Studio Max model exporter source code" ... I've yet to find it in any of Steam's many many subdirectories.

Actually, with your recent deluge of MaxScripts, and this topic title, I thought you'd written one for exporting BSP geometry from Max to Hammer [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

From what I've read about the exporter incuded with Steam, it's the uncompiled version of the HL1 exporter for Max 3.1. Not much used in today's world. That's why people are so upset.

And if I get really into it, I might just end up writing some tools myself. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Hey thanks for the heads up.. I'll be putting this to go use I'm sure.

I've been mapping with it since the Source SDK launched.
It's pretty much the same old Hammer, with some improvements.
One thing that urks me though, is the way you have to create custom "materials" for the Source Engine. You need your base texture (and whatever else you have, bump, etc) in TGA format. After that, you have to create a text file that explains it's custom compile attributes (ie; $skybox). This texture file is required for texture compiling.
After that, you either have to manually drag/drop files or create a batch file, which calls to the vtex.exe application. This creates a VMT file and a VTF file. The VMT file is yet another text file, which dictates what properties it has for the engine. Here's a snippet of one:

"UnlitGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "sdk/additive"
"$additive" 1
}

So what this dictates, is that the texture, "additive.tga" from the /sdk folder, is NOT lit by lightmaps (UnlitGeneric). The $basetexture call, tells what tga file it's referring to, and the $additive call makes the texture render additively.

While that example is pretty straight forward, it becomes rather convoluted when you have to create a water texture, for example. For this, you have to type out base texture names, normal map names, shaders, etc etc. It would be far better to have a GUI interface with sliders, so if you want water that is foggy at 40% depth, just slide that bar over four notches.

This texturing process is the biggest headache for Source. Aside from that, it's not much differant than developing for HL1. There are also about 50 new entities to mess around with, including the lovely physics entities [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Hope that clears things up slighty [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

Vassago: Thanks for the input. It sounds like you've got a pretty good handle on this. I hope you won't mind if I pop up with a question every now and then. Although, I do try and figure stuff out for myself before I bother people with questions.

On a side note, I have a friend that flew in to work on Daredevil for a while, Chris Guzman, aka Guzzy. Cool guy, did you work with him?

Sure thing, I don't mind ya askin questions [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

And yea, Chris was a cool guy - kind of quite though. He was doing level scripting for us. As he has probably said though, our engine and programming staff were not up-to-par with the design and art teams. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]