Max2Hammer
polycounter lvl 18
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.
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.
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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.
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
And if I get really into it, I might just end up writing some tools myself.
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
Hope that clears things up slighty
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?
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.