How are animated radars done?

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xzzy

aa
Jan 30, 2010
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It's probably just a texture on the prop itself. I can't crack open gcfscape right now to look at it but you could do it yourself easily. Just go find the vmt and look at it in a text editor to see what they did.
 

seth

aa
May 31, 2013
1,019
851
Oh I was thinking about this entirely the wrong way. I thought you had to apply them somehow in Hammer, when all you have to do is add some proxies to the model's vmt to animate the texture. So it's not related to Hammer at all.
 

Ravidge

Grand Vizier
aa
May 14, 2008
1,544
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Probably one of the most underutilized effect features in all source mapping.
It's so good when it's right, but no one really knows how to do them, and the people who do have all made a pact together and sworn to never let the secret out.

You could do a lot of amazing stuff with these things... better than waterfalls even!
 

seth

aa
May 31, 2013
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851
VFIG wrote up a good tutorial on these here on nodraw.net, by the way.

That's the article I read but forgot where it was... thanks!

Probably one of the most underutilized effect features in all source mapping.
It's so good when it's right, but no one really knows how to do them, and the people who do have all made a pact together and sworn to never let the secret out.

You could do a lot of amazing stuff with these things... better than waterfalls even!

Yeah it seems like there's a lot you could do with these, I'll see if I can weasel my way into the material proxy cult.
 
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xzzy

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Jan 30, 2010
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As for the "are they expensive" question, the answer is "sort of." I mean every gizmo you turn on is certainly going to make the computer do more work, but you already see them all over the place.. the "no entry" material used in front of spawn rooms is a Proxy for example, and you don't hear about people with computers from 2005 complaining about them.

As with all things it's about finding the balance between two extremes.
 

Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
Probably one of the most underutilized effect features in all source mapping.
It's so good when it's right, but no one really knows how to do them, and the people who do have all made a pact together and sworn to never let the secret out.

You could do a lot of amazing stuff with these things... better than waterfalls even!

Sadly half the fun ones don't work in tf2 :(
 

henke37

aa
Sep 23, 2011
2,075
515
Look at the list of proxies just for tf 2. There sure are a lot of them for the game.

Anyway, material proxies are rather cheap, since they just change a few numbers for each rendered frame.
 

xzzy

aa
Jan 30, 2010
815
531
The pyroland effect is a proxy too.. does a texture swap and adds a tint along with the screen borders.

Which I'd love to play with if Valve would get rid of the stupid mtp.cfg requirement. Make it a condition that you can apply to players and that would be the best thing in the world.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
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Sadly half the fun ones don't work in tf2 :(
Which ones would those be? Like, would any of the ones in that Nodraw article not work for example?
 

Beetle

L9: Fashionable Member
Aug 17, 2008
627
178
The bsp in the nodraw article loads and runs fine in TF2. There's nothing in the developer wiki that seems like would exclude TF2 either.

Yea I remember trying out that map. It had a dozen effects or so and they all worked.