Hammer Battle Mech - Developers

I made 9 seperate .BSP's, and I took pictures of them. Then I GIF'd them together and look what happened. [URL=http://filesmelt.com/][IMG]http://filesmelt.com/dl/Hammer_Mech.gif[/IMG][/URL] I've never seen anyone do this before, and I'm very proud of how it came out. Also sorry if this lags your browser, I didn't want to scale it down too much or the majesty of this battle mech would be lost.

Thats pretty cool. And firegod, make that your Avatar right now!

Are you going to texture it? Reminds me of the evil stop-motion robot in Robocop.

Well, he cant really texture it now since hes already made it all into a .gif... He would have to make it all over again.

I like the dev textures, they're just....clean and simple. I didn't want to challenge the clarity by using more detailed metal textures. Plus the HL2 metal sucks and I haven't a clue how to go about using customs.

This thing is pretty cool.

Firegod, you're amazing. I love you.

It's like some sort of primitive 3d animation setup. It's cool, but so restricted by the whole bsp system.

That's very freakin epic of you!

A very interesting, and novel way of animating. Bravo to you for having the resolve to stick with this idea.

We should get some other people's content here. :eng101: [release]Start by spending an hour making a really cool looking thing you want to animate. Every part that can move on its own should be a func_detail. The leg sections on this mech are all separately func_detailed, whereas the guns and body are 1 func_detail. This is because the guns never move separate from the body. Put a spawnpoint and platform in the VMF so that when you spawn you're looking directly at your subject. This will take a few recompiles to get right. Make a folder for the future slides. I called mine Hammer Mech Slides. Save the VMF in that folder with an appropriate name. I called my first one "mech1.vmf" Use a program that takes screenshots in-game. I used WeGame. When you spawn, wait for the Building Graphs thing and the Steam Community thing to go away, then take a picture. Open that picture and then go back to your first VMF. Using the picture as a guide, adjust the VMF for the next slide. Then you can either save it as mech2.vmf or overwrite the last one. I saved all mine seperately. Keep doing this until you can keep pressing the "Next" button in your photo viewer and it looks like the thing is moving. Once you have all your pictures, use Photoshop or some other art program to resize them. I proportionally took my 1024x768 pictures and lowered them down half size to 512x314. Also when I saved the resized files, I put them in a new folder called "resized slides". and saved them as PNG. You can use a multitude of GIF making programs, some are probably better than others. I tried two, and the one I ended up using was this online one. Note its max capacity is 12 slides. My mech only used 9, but then again it's not the most fluid thing in the world. It's also running on the "Fastest" setting. [url]http://www.makeagif.com/[/url] And there you have it, a GIF of a Hammer map.[/release]

Why not position the camera where you want it, and then type "getpos" and put the coordinates back in with setpos_exact/setang_exact?

It looks awesome.

[QUOTE=Lord Ned;26668203]Why not position the camera where you want it, and then type "getpos" and put the coordinates back in with setpos_exact/setang_exact?[/QUOTE] I actually haven't heard of that. But what the heck,at the end of the day, I still have a GIF with a steady camera.

You should use bearings and constraints so you can pose it in-game, i know it would be glitchy as fuck at first, but with some tweaking and no-colliding it could be done!

[QUOTE=wardino388;26680799]You should use bearings and constraints so you can pose it in-game, i know it would be glitchy as fuck at first, but with some tweaking and no-colliding it could be done![/QUOTE] Ha, compile every part with Propper and let gmod players rope/ballsocket them together.