Vertex Colour in Source Engine

passerby

anyone know if the source engine specifically tf2 has support for vertex colour.

im working a level that has lots of caves and tunnels in it and i rather model these in maya so i can have more control over the shape, instead of using displacmeants. and im trying to figure out if there is a way to use the meshes vertex colour to influence a blend material in the game, and i also want to find a way to get AO that is baked into the meshes vert colour to work.

any one have any experience doing this like this with the Source Engine.

cman2k

Having considerable experience with the Source Engine, I can say pretty confidently that this is not going to work.

AFAIK: The model processing strips out vertex colors, there is no way to pass them into the engine.

In addition, setting up a custom shader to let you do what you imagine is a very difficult task...much more complex than coding a standalone shader in hlsl.

So yeah dude. Suck it up and learn to use those displacements. They are pretty powerful at the end of the day. You can do everything you want...it's just that you have to use the existing tools, which can be difficult.

passerby

ya thanks, and i already know how to use displacmeants been using source and goldsrc for e very long time, i just have recently been using UDK alot and gotten use to useing meshes for most things which are quicker to make, and generally look better for things like this.

so if i wanted to do it with meshes there is really no way to add variation to the texture unless i give each piece it's own texture space instead of just using a tiling texture.

Zipfinator

There's no way to do this. Just use displacements. You can do anything you could do in Maya or Max with displacements. It just won't be as optimized. I understand you want the control of being able to model them but there's no way to do vertex color on them currently. If you need some ideas on how to get some more unique cave formations take a look at the Episode 2 caves. The displacements in there are a great example of what's possible.

passerby

ya thanks

i dont got EP2 installed now so i cant check but are any of the caves levels part of the SDK or do i need to decompile a map to check that out.

Zipfinator

You'll have to decompile them to look at them. There's probably somewhere that someone has uploaded all of the Ep2 maps decompiled though. Just google for it.