Modelling in Maya 2010?

KaiserFate

L69: Deviant Member
Dec 9, 2009
69
12
I sincerely apologise if this is in the wrong forum; admins, move it if you have to.
I understand it may belong in some other thread (or some other site) but after days of exhaustive and utterly fruitless searching across the internet, I have found nothing that will let me do what I initially assumed would be a very simple task.

I want to model hats. Technically I'm able to make a hat right now, I have Maya 2010 fully installed and functional. But making hats is very difficult if I don't have the character I want to model a hat for (in this case, Pyro) in the scene as a frame of reference. It would be totally unprofessional to send a model to Valve that doesn't even fit the character model, and I assume they'd just delete it rather than go to the effort of 'fixing' it themselves.

Hence, I want to convert a Source .mdl to something Maya will read, like an .obj file.

The Valve Developer wiki has me dead in my tracks from square one, telling me I need a version of Maya before 2010. Does that already mean all hope is lost??
People keep talking about scripts that are in the SourceSDK folder that let you import models into every version of maya but mine. I downloaded and (I assume) correctly installed MDLDecompiler and StudioCompiler anyway, and they don't even work because apparently they can't read the DLL properly.

I'm completely stonewalled and all I want to do is import a basic Pyro model. I'm shocked that something so simple could be so utterly out of my control. If anyone knows anything about any way whatsoever to alleviate this problem, please share because I'm desperate.

Thanks in advance.
 

KaiserFate

L69: Deviant Member
Dec 9, 2009
69
12
Alright, cool. Hopefully we get some modellers looking in here soon because this is getting to be a real headache for me.
 

fubarFX

The "raw" in "nodraw"
aa
Jun 1, 2009
1,720
1,978
yeah, converting the mdl to an smd is the first step.

now to get it inside maya you will need a smd import/export script.
if there is no such script for maya 2010, it won't work. plain simple.

however I guess you could open a smd in an other moddeling program featuring a smd script and export it to maya from there.

blender will do that for ya.

this is getting to be a real headache for me.

better get used to it lol. modeling in source has always been a pain in the ass... for me at least
 
Last edited:

KaiserFate

L69: Deviant Member
Dec 9, 2009
69
12
however I guess you could open a smd in an other moddeling program featuring a smd script and export it to maya from there.

blender will do that for ya.

Right.

In that case I'll download blender, see if it works - does it seriously have an mdl-smd conversion option built in? If not, I suppose it uses MDLDecompiler or StudioCompile as plugins?
I can't use Blender to save my life, I am used to Maya but I'll look into using it as a middle man conversion tool. Will report back with results, but thanks for what you've given me so far. :thumbup1:
 

fubarFX

The "raw" in "nodraw"
aa
Jun 1, 2009
1,720
1,978