![]() ![]() It looked like the scene from The Matrix where Neo’s mouth becomes glued shut, you know “What good is a phone call, if you’re unable to speak?”. Then I hit another curious snag when I went to test the mouth after adding the blend sequences: the jaw moved fine, but the mouth appeared to be stretching open. What I didn’t know was that any blend sequence named “mouth” will automatically be assigned to the common mouth bone controller (which HL:S uses) by the Source engine. Thankfully, it only rotated one bone (the jaw) in a single direction for two frames, so I could manually edit the sequences. The blend sequences basically just interpolate between multiple other sequences–in this case the mouth open and mouth closed sequences. However, after having absolutely no luck getting bone controllers to work, I tried decompiling other HL:S models and found extra sequences for mouth and neck movement called blend sequences. Originally, I had suspected the bone controllers were responsible for the mouth and neck movements, and the Half-Life 2 Model Viewer seemed to confirm this theory. Some mainly random fiddling with the “eyeball” properties and “eyes” attachment was also in order.įixing the mouth was made more confusing than it should have been by decompile inconsistencies and more unintuitive Source changes to the model formats. ![]() Fixing the eyes was significantly less straightforward and required several trial-and-error tests until finding out that the Flex data was required in the compile script even though the model didn’t take advantage of the Flex facial expressions. It was a clever and time-saving fix, albeit the briefcase now bleeds if shot. I fixed this by just taking the geometry of the briefcase and putting it into the G-Man’s geometry. The G-Man’s briefcase was apparently a separate model which was attached to the G-Man’s skeleton however, quite problematically, it had the HL2 model’s skeleton and thus refused to attach correctly to the HL:S skeleton I was using. Over the next few days, I dealt with each of the remaining major problems, which had rather unintuitive fixes–I was obviously still learning as I went, though. Of course, I also needed a MDL decompiler to get the geometry and animations from the subject models and the Source SDK to compile and view the models (all of which, annoyingly enough, require being logged into Steam to use). Despite the upgraded engine, the models function roughly the same as they did in the Gold Source engine, merely having more vertices and bones. It turns out, however, that Milkshape3D had been updated for Half-Life 2 and did everything I needed for this conversion so I dropped Mod Tool. Not to mention, it has a horrible installer and installs some files wherever it pleases. Even though I had an idea of what I wanted to do, I had limited success trying to figure out how to do it in Mod Tool. It seemed like XSI Mod Tool was the preferred free modeling solution around the internet, but its interface is very complex and quite overwhelming. Given my experience with Valve’s model format in the past, it was obvious that I’d need to rework the G-Man’s animations to match what Half-Life: Source expected and that this would require the use of a SMD-compatible modeling program. I took another look at the G-Man to see how I might overcome his lack of vanilla Half-Life animations. Greeted with the same low-poly models and low-res textures as last time, I became more stalwart in my longing for high-quality graphics. ![]() Recently, I decided to go back through HL: Source again on a whim. At the time of the aforementioned post, I had even tried to copy the G-Man from Half-Life 2 into HL: Source, but alas the animations didn’t match up. This omission of graphical upgrade really irked me. However, as I detailed in a post almost two years ago, Valve couldn’t even be bothered to do some decent textures or models for the port, despite them having most of the necessary materials already created for HL2. So, along comes Half-Life: Source, a straight port of Half-Life content into Half-Life 2’s Source Engine. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get into some Source Engine modding ever since Half-Life 2 came out and sure, I’ve wanted to do my own total-conversion mod (who hasn’t?) but knew I lacked the attention span to do so. ![]()
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