TF2 Hat Model Problem

SoftwareMater

Hey Everyone what is up i have a little bit of a problem with my TF2 Hat what happens is the hat is in front of the player (Heavy) Please Help me solve this problem and then i can make hats and put them in game! Also I Use Blender

SCREEN SHOT BELOW!!!

Baddcog

Not much info there...

Are you rigging to the bip_head bone and exporting both together?

Have you reset pivot?
delete skin modifier
choose effect pivot only/reset scale and translations.
reskin

Most likely its your transforms.

It may be that your bone is incorrect position. Did you use full heavy rig (decompiled) or the head rig that valve released?

SoftwareMater

what is pivot

heinous

looks like you didn't assign the hat to a bone, but positioned it on the heavy's head, so that the hat's origin is considered bip_head when the importer imports it, it's away from the heavy relatively the same distance as the height of the heavy.

SoftwareMater

and yes i used the heavy rig decompiled

SoftwareMater

i assigned the hat to the bone

SoftwareMater

bip_head

Baddcog

what happens is anytime you scale,shrink, extryde, attch, whatever an object in 3d it's 'pivot point' becomes uncenter, distorted, etc...


So you need to reset it before attaching to the bone.

You'll have to consult your 3d program for specifics

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Also in the workshop how to from valve you can download Just the head rigs. Makes it easier than dealing with all the bones.

SoftwareMater

how do i reset the pivot point in blender

EmAr

I had to deal with this problem too. 2 points to make:

- AFAIK, there's no way to "freeze transforms" in Blender which is quite disappointing.

- The bone orientations in the current SDK models are different from the ones in HellJumper's tutorial(or it is imported in a wrong way). The head bone in his tutorial is oriented towards the left shoulder while the bone in the current SDK is oriented towards the top of the head. See the screenshot below:





The good news is I found a semi-functional work around. At least it worked for me:

- Select your bone in EDIT mode in Blender. Select the head.

- Copy position values of the head and paste values into 3D cursor's corresponding values.

- Select your hat mesh in object mode.

- Click the origin button in top left of the screen and choose "origin to 3d cursor". You will be rotating your mesh around this point to fix the orientation.

- Use the .fbx for the export/import process and choose Y front, Z up while exporting. This seems to fix the origins/pivots of the two different orientations.

- Load your model in TF2 item submission tool and launch the preview. It should at least appear around the correct area. It will have a wrong rotation of about 90 degrees.

The rest is an iterative process. Repeat as many times as required:

- Take a screenshot. Go back to Blender with alt+tab so you don't close the item preview.

- Rotate the mesh so that the rotation corresponds to the reverse of what you see in the item preview.

-Check if it's better in item preview.

I know it's tiring but this was the best thing I could come up with. I hope it works for you too

EDIT: BTW I'd have loved to use a decompiled rig from the game files but I think the packages are updated to become unbrowsable by GCFscape somehow. I'd love to be wrong with this one. Any help is appreciated.

EDIT 2: I corrected the wrong steps, I apologize for the inconvenience. Maybe I should just record a video.

SoftwareMater

make a video about those steps please then give me the link for it so i can bookmark it and use it when ever this problem happens again. Also Thanks for pictures and detailed steps i have not tried this though but i hope it works for me!

Baddcog

a demand for a video and no thanks?

SoftwareMater

sorry thanks!

EmAr

OK, here's the video. Sorry for my sleepiness, I couldn't even make the .smd exporter work but the "fix" is there. You can skip to 7:30 as I replicated the problem up to that point and the rest is the workaround:

EDIT: I removed the video as a proper solution is posted below.

EmAr

It turns out bone orientations are completely ignored while importing .smd files in my setup. I opened one of the .smd files from the SDK in notepad++. I swapped some bone direction values and the file import resulted in exactly the same orientations.

Baddcog

game doesn't use the bones you export, it uses them as a ref where to attach to player rig.

If your object has bad transform pivot location then that needs fixed.

dettaching the head bone from the rest of the rig can help also (if full body rig used).
but export everything.

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if you are ONLY using the bip_head bone you don't even need a rig.

Just create a bone at 0,0,0 and skin your mesh to it. It might take a couple times in and out (alt-tab) of game to re-rig (yes delete skin modifier and redo each time).

it's easy though, just nudge the hat in the correct direct, hit skin (only one bone is instant skin) and test. Needs to go down, delete skin, move down, hit skin, export...

also, when adjusting the pivot make sure it's Y axis points up!!!

SoftwareMater

is there an easier way???

EmAr

Lol this is embarassing if it works for you as well.

Go to the scene tab(click 1) and find the exporter settings(underlined part):



It appears that my main problem with the exporter was the export path setting. It just doesn't save the directory sometimes. Without a directory, it doesn't export.

Just copy the export path from an explorer window and paste it into the exporter settings and hit enter on the keyboard. (When I use the "browse" button in the exporter settings it will put this into the setting: //\ )

OK, to fix the orientation problem: Click "Y"(marked as 2 in my image) in the up axis setting.

I think it's ok to laugh hysterically at this point if it worked. So simple

SoftwareMater

Dude guess what??? It worked! thanks a lot it worked, now i can post hats and do hat skins like replace the ellis cap with my hat BTW the first time i saw how easy it is just to change 2 settings made me laugh for 30 seconds but it worked and i am so HAPPY.
Thanks So Much Again for the help! Bye