Need Help With SFM Model-Making - Developers

I really, [I]really[/I] hope this is in the right place and apologize in advance if it's not. I had a difficult time deciding whether this went here or in the SFM forum, but in the end I suppose this has more to do with [I]modeling[/I] for SFM than SFM itself. So I've been working on an enhanced version of the female Engineer mod specifically for SFM use, and I've planned for her to have lots of different body groups for maximum versatility. I've got the models completed for each body group, but I have a pressing question before I start texturing: in Blender, the places where certain body groups meet together have rather unsightly lines: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/eOkNYSM.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/4tiGjtk.jpg[/IMG] Namely, where any of my arm body groups meet my tank top body group, and where any of my feet body groups meet my shorts body group. Will these seams still show up in SFM? Because I can certainly make the places where these body groups meet much less obvious. It just involves having a large number of extra polygons being rendered because the arms and legs would be visible at all times. But since SFM isn't an actual [I]game[/I] with lots of intensive real-time rendering, I don't imagine that it will be as big of an issue. But also, I suppose I must double-check that I'm going about this whole thing properly in the first place. It's my understanding that all body groups are different models (sharing the same texture files) that simply get grouped together under one .mdl during compiling and are then stitched together accordingly in SFM/Gmod/what have you via properly coding the QC file. Thank you so much in advance for anyone who can help me. And so you guys know, I'm going to be coming back with several more questions as I hit subsequent stages that I have no idea what to do. And in the end, I might have to get someone to just go ahead and do a couple of things for me outright (such as facial flexes), with proper credit given of course.

The seams will definitely show up, but how noticeable they'll be depends on the texture, lighting, and so on. To fix them, you'll probably just need to change the smoothing groups or weld some vertexes along those seams. It looks like it may help in more places than just clothing transitions too. I don't use Blender though so if you need the specifics on how to do that, perhaps SergeantJoe will wander in here.

Alright, good thing I didn't get into texturing before I asked this. What other places have seams that need fixing, may I ask? All other parts of the model look fine to me. And I don't know about those, so hopefully this SergeantJoe will stumble across this thread and lend a hand.

another way to cover them up is to use a seam concealer, like a necklace or shirt cuff, etc. they're used in skyrim a lot. you weren't aware that these would be an issue when you started and didn't plan around them.

Yes, I know those could be a solution if the seams were in the appropriate places and pertaining to the appropriate body groups (with these body group combinations, concealers are pretty much impossible at the current sites of intersection). I did know they could [I]potentially[/I] be an issue, I just didn't know for certain (and didn't know that they would leave such painfully obvious seams). As I said, I have a plan of action but I'm waiting to see if someone else can offer a better solution before I go too far.

Instead of just bodygrouping the forearm and hand you could bodygroup the entire arm that way the seam would be invisible when it gets to the shirt. But i'm pretty sure you can actually blend them together but not in blender though because of the way it currently calculates normals.

That's what my current planned fix is. I was just sort of reluctant to do so since it would involve unnecessary rendering when using the body groups that would cover large amounts of the arms/legs. But if it's the only solution aside from possibly blending in an outside program, I suppose that's going to be what I'll do. EDIT: And that's what I went ahead and did. Looks like that took care of the seams, I just had to do a bit of fixing to get the arms and legs to fit inside the sleeves/pants. Here's all of the body groups together: [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Ffb7jts.jpg[/IMG] So pretty much all of this will be able to be mix-and-matched together to get just the look you need for your movie/poster. It's essentially 11 body group sets with 29 collective options between them. Now I'm off to do some normal mapping and texturing. :)

if it's for use in something like SFM the number of polies will matter less, although they could still be an issue. if you really wanted to optimize though you could go through and make body groups out of each arm and sleeve and remove the unseen parts of the arm from the body group. pain in the ass though, even if it doesn't fuck up your textures.

Well, as long as a higher polycount isn't a major issue everything should turn out okay (I'd actually be kinda screwed if a higher polycount was exceptionally bad). Also, I have another question: should the model be in tris or quads? Because I know all the TF2 models and whatnot I've imported have been in tris, but I think quads create a smoother surface (at least in Blender). I don't what difference it really makes in the final product, though. :/ EDIT: Another question: How would I go about having certain body groups using their own separate texture files while still being grouped under one skin in SFM? Because my Gunslinger body group is unwrapping in tons of tiny and confusing pieces that would be wonderful to be able to have on their own separate texture, and the original mod (which has a Gunslinger body group) has both of the Gunslinger's textures separate from the body textures. So essentially what I'm wanting to do is be able to select "Skin 2" in SFM, and that swap more than one texture.

everything is made of tris; they're the smallest shape that doesn't have sides on top of each other. that said, it's best to have them all paired into quads as much as possible for animating and smoothing. i can't really answer that. i'm not sure you can. you may be able to have multiple skin groups for a single model though.

Sooo… I should leave it in quads, then? The whole reason I'm asking is because whenever I import a Source model, its wireframe is always entirely composed of tris (and I mean actual tri faces; I'll include an image to illustrate what I mean). But I've always immediately converted them to quads to work with. I just have never completed my own Source model so I don't know if tris are a necessity or if the imported models are all actually in quads and Blender/the SMD importer just automatically converts them into tris upon import. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/FcRnsHI.jpg[/IMG] Hopefully this comparison between my model (left) and the original (right) shows what I mean when I ask if this needs to be in quads or tris. And I suppose it also serves to help me ask another question: I'm not going too high-poly, am I (I sort of feel that I am now that I'm looking at mine and the original together)? I'm sort out of my comfort zone with this model because I'm not using a sub surf modifier, and I always want my model to be as smooth as possible, which probably isn't that good for something intended for Source (even if it is SFM). EDIT: Oh, and please do explain about skin groups.

bare in mind that i've never used blender before but this is the difference between quads, quads with all edges rendered, and tris. [IMG]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/37308078/Stuff/Tris and Quads Modeling.png[/IMG] everything is always tris but pairing the tris into quads is better and anything larger than a quad is bad if it's going to be animated in a way that distorts it. what you have in your picture is basically a case of quads vs quads with the center edge visible. you probably are going to high but it's probably isn't going to mater for SFM. in tf2 it would be a problem because you could potentially have 32 of those on screen at once. the original is a little rough in some spots, most notably the pant bottoms, and would benefit some from another loop but yours are both overly dense and are to smooth to be bunched cloth. your top looks fine, although the waist has a loop you added that isn't doing anything. a big part of your problem is, if i'm understanding you correctly, that you're trying to make the low poly look better by adding polies instead of using normal maps or textures or things like that. idk how good blender is at removing loops but unless it's really good at it i would leave it and just keep it in mind for later. really, the original is pretty well optimized. another way to see what it looks like really smooth is to throw what ever blender calls turbo smooth on top of it and turn it off or remove it when you're actually working. i don't know if blender uses a modifier stack like max does but it should have something similar. i don't know enough about skin groups to say much but my understanding is that it swaps the texture for entire models. if you had the parts you didn't want swapped with the rest split from the model and then attached in source with attachment points or a bone merge or whatever it has then it would certainly work. you might be still be able to change certain textures with skingroups but you'd have to ask someone with more knowledge about it. i would suggest the big modeling or porting threads.

Alright, I think we're both on the same page with the quads vs. tris thing now. Looks like I don't have a problem there, then. Oh yeah, I definitely know it'd be a problem in TF2. I was just under the impression that since SFM isn't an actual game, a high polycount wouldn't be so bad. I mean, sure you still wouldn't want to go super, ultra, attempting-to-replicate-the-movies high, but you could have more than Source games would normally allow. It's safe to say that my love of high polycounts throws porting this to Gmod out the window. Not that I really had any plans of doing that, it was just a thought when I started this project. I'll admit that I added a lot of loops to the pants because I ended up practically remodeling the entire knee area to get the kneepads looking nice. I could probably go back and get rid of a few loops, but I quite like how the pants look now TBH. And the waist loop is actually doing something in the back. And I am planning to use normal maps in addition to the actual higher polycount. I've got the multires meshes sculpted out, I just need to get all the parts unwrapped properly so I can bake them. As I said, I might go back and get rid of some loops for the sake of neatness. For example, the arms are cluttered to the point where I don't like looking at them in wireframe view because of all the loops I added to make the high-poly fingers. ^^; And I'm pretty sure you'd be talking about sub surf modifiers. I figure it would be best to not use it at all for Source modeling since it wouldn't be able to be kept in the final product, and from personal experience the base mesh can get kinda screwy when using sub surfs (especially when combined with edge split like I have on this model). And BTW, I looked up skin groups, and I think you just provided me with my texturing solution. Thanks! :) EDIT: However, could someone please tell me if there's a limit to the number of skin groups and the number of skins within those groups? If everything goes according to my current plan, there would be four skin groups (RED, BLU, RED Uber, and BLU Uber), each with five skins in them (depending upon how everything unwraps, I might be able to reduce that number to four)... And now that I think about it, that doesn't include any other necessary things like the eye textures and normal maps. :o So I would really like to know if there's a limit before I get too into texturing.

Bump because I kinda need an answer ASAP.

[QUOTE=Dragara;45427470]Bump because I kinda need an answer ASAP.[/QUOTE] I don't think there is a limit. I've seen models with tons of skin groups work.

I think there's a 32 [B]material[/B] limit per model but you can have all the skins you want

Thanks to both of you. And now could you please explain a bit about materials? I know when I import SMDs to Blender they all come with some materials already attached (for example, the original female engineer imports with "engineer.bmp", "engineer_head.bmp", "eyeball_r.bmp", and "eyeball_l.bmp"), but the ones imported with the model don't seem to actually do anything other than change the display color of the model. I'm going to assume they're supposed function in Source like they do in Blender, and thus the materials cover things like reflectivity and transparency?

No materials mean the .vmts ("Valve Material Type") the model its going to look for in order to get the texture (this file is where you set reflectivity ,tranparency ect for you're model). Let me give you a example [QUOTE]$texturegroup sniper_skins { { sniper_red sniper_head_red eyeball_r eyeball_l sniper_lens c_arrow } }[/QUOTE] This line is telling the model to look for 6 different vmts with those names now if you wanted to add a second skin it'll look like this [QUOTE]$texturegroup sniper_skins { { sniper_red sniper_head_red eyeball_r eyeball_l sniper_lens c_arrow } { sniper_blue sniper_head_blue eyeball_r eyeball_l sniper_lens c_arrow } }[/QUOTE] You could think this added the material limit up to 12 but no this only added it up to 8 because only 2 new vmt names were added. [QUOTE]$texturegroup sniper_skins { { sniper_red sniper_head_red eyeball_r eyeball_l sniper_lens c_arrow } {[B] sniper_blue[/B] [B]sniper_head_blue [/B] eyeball_r eyeball_l sniper_lens c_arrow } }[/QUOTE] You can keep building skins until you hit the model's limit. And the materials names is represented in blender in the materials tabs under where you select the texture for you're model. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/T26tsVJ.png[/IMG]

[I]OH.[/I] Okay, now I get it. Thanks so much for clearing that up. Will texture groups include normal maps and the like in addition to the actual textures, or would those fall under a separate coding segment? (I'm sorry if all of these questions are annoying and super-obvious, I'm a pretty big noob at this.)

Normals fall under the whole vmts coding and that's a whole other can of worms read [URL="https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Material"]this [/URL]if you want to know more about vmts because there's so much things you can set them to do.

And here I was starting to think that maybe making models for Source would be easier than I initially thought it would be. :') I'll have to do some research on that after I've got my textures all painted out. Thanks again.