Okay, hi. I've never done anything related to modeling or modding, I just pose shit in Gmod. A friend of mine is making an "HD" pack of textures for SSBB, and asked me to make high quality renders of the cast for the character selection screen. I found most of the ragdolls on garrysmod.org, most of which weren't exactly useful. The main problem was that they lacked full finger posing, but that's beside the point.
I told him about this, and he came up with an idea. He has all of the models at hand and ready to give to me. More importantly, he has the trophy models - static prop versions of the cast. If I were to put those into Gmod, I could quickly and easily make renders of them all for my friend.
Now, this is where the problems arise. As stated previously, I have no clue what I'm doing here. So, I tried googling shit to hopefully figure this all out myself.
I started by opening a folder of a simple model I used once - a pencil.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/IFG0o.png[/img]
Alright, cool. I know the .mdl is the actual model, and the .tga is the texture. No clue what the other things were. I opened up the first .vtx in Notepad++, hoping to make some headway.
[t]http://i.imgur.com/zuKYm.png[/t]
[I]Fuck.[/I]
No luck with the other .vtx files either. I opened up the .phys and got somewhere, finally.
[t]http://i.imgur.com/6XXVf.png[/t]
I figured "when the time comes, I can just copy this and change "pencil_phys" to "trophy_phys" or some shit."
Open up the .vvd in Notepad++.
[t]http://i.imgur.com/EEVlY.png[/t]
Fuckity fuck fuck. No clue what the [I]fuck[/I] I'm doing.
Then my friend decides to tell me that the model can be exported in two formats - .mdl0 and .dae.
And now I'm here. Hopefully we can find a model importer/exporter that will let us change the file format, but from there, is there [I]anywhere[/I] that can explain to me Valve's format when it comes to these files? I'm on the Developer Wiki right now and it's all gibberish to me.
[sp]I'm prepared for boxes, don't worry.[/sp]
If you're just hexing (renaming the models to avoid conflicts), then this: [url]http://facepunch.com/threads/395931[/url] is pretty helpful, just skip to step 21. When hexing (he probably says this but I didn't really pay attention), don't worry about actually opening any of the files except the .mdl, just make sure they all have the same name as it and are in the same folder. As for the .phys file editing, you're probably right, I've never had to hex a phys file before :V
As for the .tga, you'll need .vtfedit, info here: [url]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VTFEdit[/url] , to open the .tga in VTFEdit and save it to .vtf with a .vmt in the same folder so the engine can find the textures (the .vtfs)
If you're actually porting and the models aren't in .mdl format, well, it's gonna get a lot more complex, real quick.
Basic overview (other people probably have way more experience than me)
[B]1.[/B] Program to convert .dae or .mdl0 to another format that [B]2.[/B] a 3d modeling program (such as Blender or Softimage XSI) can open so [B]3.[/B] you can find and use a valve source plugin for said program that enables you to export to .smd so that [B]4.[/B] you can then compile said .smds to .mdl and the other files (no need to hex afterward) after [B]5.[/B] correcting any texture errors (caused by the conversion process, such as lineup screwup or the textures not being applied anymore) so [B]6.[/B] you can put the .mdl and .vvd and etc and finished .vtf files into their respective Gmod folders so you can hopefully [B]7.[/B] do whatever it is you wanted to do with them in Gmod.
Basically, [B]pain.jpg[/B].
Have fun! :wink:
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