Weapon Mddeling

shxsy

Hey folks. I've been looking all over for some info about the base weapon models from each class and I can't find a ton. I'm looking to build I custom set and I 'd like to have the weapons as a base ref, mainly for scale, to start from. There isn't a ton on this site or over on the Valve community either. The only thing I've found here is a thread referring to decompiling the game assets to get the fbx/obj files. My question is how do I go about decompiling these files, whats the software for decompile and where do they live in the game. Any help would be great as I haven't had much luck turning things up on my own.

EmAr

You decompile models with Crowbar:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Crowbar

You need GCFScape to extract files from .vpk files:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/GCFScape

- Models are in tf2_misc_dir.vpk.
- Extract all files(in addition to the .mdl file) with the same name to a folder.
- Decompile with crowbar.
- Import .smd files into your modeling application.

- Textures(.vtf files) are not required for decompiling but they are in tf2_textures_dir.vpk
- Use VTFEdit to convert them into .tga's etc.

EmAr

VTFEdit:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VTFEdit

shxsy

Any idea on how to get the .smd files into maya? Seems like this is a fairly common problem. I'm looking at the runmaya.bat file that comes with SourceSDK, but haven't had any luck yet. Any experience with getting these models into maya? Thanks for you help EmAr. Long live the seal!!!

EmAr

You're welcome and thanks for supporting the seal

I've never used Maya for this. As a last resort, you can use Blender to import and convert .smd's into .obj's at the cost of bone weights but as weapons are mostly rigid objects, this can be somewhat practical.

shxsy

Yah... There's not a ton of support for maya from Valve, at least that I can find.
I found this plug-in for max...

http://www.wunderboy.org/apps/smdimport.php

I'll give it a shot and let you know how it goes. Does Blender, by default, handle .smd file types?

EmAr

There should be a way for Maya, source files(in Steam\SteamApps\"your Steam user name"\sourcesdk_content\tf\modelsrc\player) provided by Valve are Maya files. You might need to install Source SDK to get those files. No weapon models are provided AFAIK though.

For Blender, you need to install a plug-in:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Blender_Source_Tools

shxsy

So I used wunderboy's max plug-in and I got it to work. Took a little trial and error to get it to work, but alas I got it. It's kind of a painful process.

Talking to some buds of mine at work and they have all had similar experiences... not a ton of great tools. I guess that's just Valve. Dunno, maybe its just me.... Either way, Thanks for the help.