Making a Soldier statue

[psihomir]

I had this idea of making a statue of a Soldier doing his salute taunt. What I had in mind, since I can't model my way out of a cardboard box, was the following: make a copy of the Soldier model, change the skin to stone, then use a prop_dynamic and use inputs to make it play the taunt animation, then freeze it at a specific moment, and voila.

It's just that there appears to be no input for pausing an animation in prop_dynamic

Does anyone have an idea how I can do this without modelling?

 

[Exuzu]

In order to do this, you're going to have to do some modelling, even if it's just decompiling and then recompiling (after some changes).

In order to add a skin to a model, you have to specify that when the model is compiled. Of course, you can just replace one of the existing .vtf's with your soldier statue skin, but then one entire team would be running around like that, and that's not exactly the best solution.

I can see if I can get this to work, as I currently have the gimp'd version of XSI, and I've done a re-skin like this one already, so I can try it for you if you have a texture made up.

 

[StoneFrog]

In order to make the statue model, you could theoretically hex the Soldier model and change the skin for this new model.

No, by hex I don't mean to put a magical spell on. Well, once you get the hang of it it's kind of like magic, but it involves a lot more numbers and stuff.

FPSBanana Tutorial On Hexing Models

As for pausing the model, I'm not sure what you could do. There's no way to pause prop_dynamic animations? Hmm, I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps there's an Input you can use to change the animation speed? You could effectively set the speed to "0" #.## seconds into his taunting animation.

 

[psihomir]

Thanks for the input guys.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my original post though - my problem is not changing the skin - I can do that perfectly fine on my own I need to know how to make the model freeze at that specific timeframe of the animation.

I think you can't set animation playback speed through inputs either :/

 

[Zeewier]

You'll need to decompile the model, then use the animation bar slide it to the salute animation. Then remove the bones and recompile it.

But this only works when the bones are exported correctly.

 

[(s2a) yahodahan]

I went through something of the same recently, needed statues of ALL the players in various poses. Ended up decompiling all and posing them myself, then fixing all the various really ugly deformation problems (using the very low poly LOD-4), customizing all the smoothing groups, re-uvw unwrapping, and finally texturing...

whew. it was ugly. (still currently working on fixing up those models...lol)

I didn't realize you COULD get those animations correctly decompiled...huh...well, if you can, do it that way!! Otherwise, lemme know if you need the ones I made- though they are very low poly. (about 1000-2000 tri each).

good luck!

 

[Westerhound]

I need one for almost every class too, and I know what poses I want and so on. I can make the texture myself but a model would be really nice. I'dlike them 2 or 3 times as big as normal model

 

[Zeewier]

If you want to make them 2 times as big I recommend you to use lod 2 3 and 4

 

[(s2a) yahodahan]

there is a place I can upload these on TF2 Maps, yes?

I will look...after posting this...which doesn't make sense...

But as Z33W13R (eh?) said, these are rather low poly, so may not eb idea for huge statues

 

[psihomir]

Kind of a big bump, heh. Anyway, I'm halfway done detailing the map now, and I looked at the latest blog post - will having the source make this easier for me? The final method I decided to go with is this one:

You'll need to decompile the model, then use the animation bar slide it to the salute animation. Then remove the bones and recompile it.

But this only works when the bones are exported correctly.

 

[Chaopsychochick]

This thread is relevant to my interests.

Psihomir, would you be okay with releasing your soldier, I want to have a statue in the middle of a town square sort of thing and Soldier saluting would be perfect for it.

 

[psihomir]

No problem, I'll release it with the map (or I can give it to you as soon as I'm done with it, heh). I'm waiting for Valve to release the sources now

For the alpha of the map, I used a placeholder - http://i25.tinypic.com/350qc1c.jpg (yes, the statue is the CP )

The real thing will be about twice as big as that.

 

[psihomir]

A bit of an update, hopefully someone can help me finish this thing as my head is about to explode.

So anyway, I decided to go ahead with decompiling the model. When I imported it in XSI, I found out that it has everything except the bones - it even has those... I don't know what they're called, the little crosses that connect the various bones. So anyway, my original intention was to rig the mesh manually, but that failed since the weightmap generated by the enveloping is really bad (in short, moving one arm causes about half of the body to move - it's really hard to fix too.)

With that out of the question, I noticed that the decompiled soldier model has a perfectly good weightmap. My next idea was to repeat the manual rigging, but in the end, delete the generated weightmap, and import the one from the original decompiled model. Which also failed, since the names of the bones don't match (bip_head as opposed to bip01_head1). So unless there's an easy way to change the name of every bone in the rig to match those in the original model, I don't have a clue what to do next.

Someone in the chat room mentioned that the missing bones problem is only in XSI - is that true, and do other modelling packages work fine with decompiled models? (by "fine" I mean not omitting the skeleton on load)

PS I actually found a way to freeze a prop_dynamic's animation, but I found out that I can't scale the model's rig through the .qc - the $scale command scales only the mesh. The result - http://i35.tinypic.com/4qhjqv.jpg (double-sized model with a normal-sized rig)
So I guess that's not an option either.

 

[Psy]

That picture is hilarious.

 

[Terr]

"Ahh, so filling! Hahaha!"

 

[psihomir]

Almost there!

http://i38.tinypic.com/112fmsn.jpg

 

[Owlruler]

Now the texture

 

[Lord Ned]

Fixup the $cdmaterials... Should be "models/player/soldier".

 

[psihomir]

It's going to use a custom texture which I'm not done with yet, that's why I didn't bother with the texture paths

 

[psihomir]

Ugh, making the collision mesh for this turned out to be quite a pain. I think I'm gonna go with some nodraw func_brush-es for now.