Working on my first submission.

Piegineer

Hello! I came in here to get some feedback on my first submission to the TF2 workshop and to hopefully get a little help on a problem I'm having.

I decided to make a simple knife for the Spy based on an Italian cinquedea. The name cinquedea means five fingers and refers to the width of the blade at it's base. I'm still trying to think of an amusing name that incorporates this fact (Alas, I've never been good with making rhyming names).

A cinquedea often blurs the line between a shortsword and a dagger, but in this case I scaled down the blade so it didn't look like the Spy is carrying around a knife that would look more at home in the Sniper's hands...





I was prepared to submitted the item yesterday, but I've been held up by a problem with the lower level of detail model. It seems to have holes along some of the edges I removed when viewing it in the model viewer.
The smd file I exported doesn't have these holes, so I guess it's happening when I compile the model.

Here's some comparison images between the high and low detail models to give a better idea of the problem.






The open edges are normally welded together in the uncompiled file. It looks like the vertices are snapping to positions conforming with the higher detail model.

If anyone can shed any light on why this may be happening, I would be extremely grateful.

two_larsens

If I were you, by the looks of it, I would reduce the polys used, since it looks needlessly high poly. In fact, for an item like this, you could probably get away with just one LoD, since a normal map would do the trick across the blade. You could have solid quads going across the blade, instead of defining the midrib and inner edge. Also, perhaps do something on the handle itself - like leather wraps?
It also looks like the blade is ghosting through the handle part?
Other than that: nice item

H

Portfolio: http://www.henriks3dworld.com/

circle of friends

I agree with two_larsens, the lod is way higher poly than it needs to be. Load up a model in the itemtest map and see what distance the lods pop in. This is just a guess but perhaps the engine removes any faces that are smaller than a certain size. Just be more strict with your lodding and it'll be fine

Also remember that weapons submitted to the workshop have a much lower chance of being accepted than hats and miscs. In saying that, nice weapon, it looks decent.

Idea for name: Five Finger Discount
Quintuple health and ammo recharge rate from enemy dispensers
cannot use friendly dispensers

(I know that's a really bad stat but whatever:P )

Matthew100001

Regarding the holes that appear in the compiled model file, try welding/merging the vertices in the uncompleted one.

Also, I recommend taking a look at the bugbait from Half-life 2, the world model (weapons that other characters are holding, pickups) has far less detail on it than the view-model(which is what you see your character holding in any first-person game).

Take a look at this
The blade is a generic one, but the entire sword is only 336 triangles. As far as your blade is concerned, there are some optimizations you could make in terms of lowering your polycount. To start off, whenever you are working with a model that's not yet finalized, you want to use quads while minimizing the prescence of triangles, this is due to edge loops. When you are getting ready for the final product, then you can go ahead and make the model 100% triangles, (in fact, when it comes time to render, or add it in as a game asset, the model is converted to triangles anyway). In addition to color maps, the Source engine supports normal and specular maps, normal maps dictate how light is reflected and at what angles so that some detail is more visible at certain angles, just take a look at the Ambassador. Specular maps on the other hand dictate how much light is reflected.

Piegineer

Thanks for the feedback.

That ghosting as actually purely coincidence. It's just a lighter brush stroke on the texture of the guard. Now that you've pointed it out to me, I can't unsee it. I'm going to have to change that.

I was under the impression from Swizzle's TF2 texturing guide that normal maps were to be used sparingly in TF2.

Similarly to the characters, normal maps are used sparingly on weapons and most shading is achieved with use of smoothing groups and modeled detail. Before you create a normal map for your weapon, make sure the details you're trying to put into the normal map can't be modeled into a low-poly weapon without going over the triangle budget.

As far as the triangle count goes, the lod0 tri count is about 1400 and the lod1 count is about 350.

I've been testing the lod in HLMV and have gotten the lod metric as low as 6 without noticing any pop-in. I've actually noticed the character model lod changes are far more pronounced.

I'm not sure the engine removing faces is the problem, though. There are no faces being removed at all. It's edges that are normally closed being broken apart.

I don't have any expectation for this item being accepted for the game. It was just a quick and simple model to work out all the kinks of creating assets and compiling them for TF2. As you can see, I still have the kink of there being holes in the lower lod. I want that worked out so it doesn't affect any of my future efforts.
I have several ideas for some full hat+misc+weapon sets that I'm eager to get work on. I've already started making a kendo outfit for the Scout. So, hopefully I can get this lod problem sorted before I get to the same stage with that set.

Ah! How did I not think of five finger discount?
I did already have the five-finger prefix in mind, but i was so focused something knife/stabbing related that I never even thought using the idiom for stealing. I actually quite like that name. I'm not really worried about coming up with stats for the item. It's usually something that's left to the game developers, isn't it?

Anyways, thanks for the help so far guys. I'll be looking forward to getting some feedback on other items soon.

With any luck, I'll figure out what's wrong with the lod on my own, but if anyone else pipes in with an idea on what's happening to the lod model in the time being, I would be extremely grateful.

Piegineer

I've been working on my Kendo Kid set for the Scout. I haven't uploaded it yet. I'm still wondering if I should make some body armor to go with it before I submit these two. I'm still wondering how to approach making the body armor, actually.



The hat is paintable, has jigglebones for the neck protector and 2 lods. I'm not sure if I should add jigglebones to the shoulder parts. I can foresee a lot of clipping if I do...



The shinai was pretty straightforward to make. It's mostly just a cylinder with some notches cut into it. I've got 2 lower lod models for it as well. I didn't have the problem I had above, luckily.

I've actually got a question regarding audio files. I don't really want this weapon to sound like a metal baseball bat when you hit things. When I submit this model, am I also supposed to include any custom sound effects or is that something the developers would handle themselves in the impossibly remote chance that they accepted this item for the game?

Another question. Where could I find some nice sound effects (Public domain, of course) or are there any existing TF2 sound effects that might sound good for a shinai?