If the minigun parts' names are similar to the bones of the survivors, you should probably find the correct bones of the survivor model that have the most matching names with the minigun parts' bones. I'm not sure since I have never made l4d/l4d2 animations nor spawned any of those models. But at least this method applies on most of the tf2 cosmetics and weapons and miscs and etc. Of course if you can lock the weapon bone(s) to the hand without any trouble, that would then be another well working method. Just make sure that the model you want to lock (in this case the minigun) stays in one piece when you move the bone that the minigun's movement and rotation transforms are dependent of.

I hope that wasn't too complicated :)

Hello! I am modelling a character that is going to have multiple bones. Alright. So I know that how bones work in blender. You basically have a joint between two spheres and this structure forms up a single bone. Then the bones' spherical parts act as the joints. But now I am confused that should I use a single whole bone to point movement of a certain part of the character and keep the bones connections like that every sphere is connected to each other between multiple bones or should I make the connections so that every entire bone is at the center of the part i want to assign the bone to and connect the bones to each other with these dashed lines. I am asking this because I have seen that every model that has been decompiled have bones connected to each other with those dashed line instead of being connected with each other from the spheres. Can someone help?

Thanks.

Hello! I am modelling a character or actually a creature that is bipedal and quite complex by it's anatomy and the size compared to a tf2 class player model is about 4-5x bigger. Now it's almost ready. Only missing 2 body parts and it has about 9500 tris. So the question number 1 is that is over 9000 tris too much for sfm or does it go well? Secondly I am wondering that should I remove N-gons and replace them with more triangles or something like that? And sorry for my curiosity. But in addition i must also ask that how I can make an UV-map as simple as possible for a complex character model?

If you know anything, any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks.

Originally posted by ClintonM0 | C::

I believe you can use light gobo textures (like a projector).

Must try that out. Thanks for replying to both of my threads :)

How does one place a separate material on surfaces such as walls of a map so that they can be used as posters on the wall? Any other ways than applying a spraypaint in sfm?

Is it possible to make a surface like tv model's screen project moving picture in sfm? And if there is. Is it only possible by adding a RT textured object into the level with Hammer editor. Or can it be done on a model through editing .qc or .vmt commands or something?

Any knowledge will be appreciated!

Originally posted by Slypear:

Originally posted by Wisaƒ:

A much more convinient way would be to Instance the muzzle particle by opening the menu of the particles animation set and selecting "Instance particle system". This allows you to live edit that particular particle animation set. Now after instancing go to "edit particle" or something like that and the particle editor will pop up as an extra window. There you can edit basically everything that is about the particle systems propreties. There are many tabs and subtabs where the editable parameters are. For exapmle you can set the default emission time and animation loop of your muzzleflash to last really long. For more particle info and tutorials from for example Zachariah scotts youtube channel.

So there shouldn't be need to make every particle separately :)

I'm not quite sure what you mean by instancing them, and nor can I try it out on my own because I'm on a craptop, but have you tried this before with success? And with what particles?

Well. At least I haven't encountered any problems when doing it. It's just basically "saving" the one particular particle effect to the .dmx so you can always edit the particle whenever you want. Note that this doesn't mean that once you have edited for example "explosion_fluid_smoke" particle through the instancing the source particle file will be altered in any way. If you want to edit a default source particle in it's source file, you must go to the bigger mode of SFM particle editor and edit the particle there. With this you can apply fixed changes on particles.

I have created custom particle effects from scratch with the editor. And with the instanced particle editor I can edit the particle propreties to suit my project. So instancing and live editing particles may get really convinient when you need particles to customly match your needs.

I'm fairly new with particle editing although I know something about it. But At least it shouldn't cause any problems. At least I haven't encountered any technical problems when using particle editor.

But I'd recommend to be careful if you're not completely sure. You know. Just in case.

Here is one example tutorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShpZT8mZ1VU

But there are plenty of them on yt.

And here is one of my videos that I have made custom particles for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WUtKW2Vt-c

Note that the moving foliages are particles.

A much more convinient way would be to Instance the muzzle particle by opening the menu of the particles animation set and selecting "Instance particle system". This allows you to live edit that particular particle animation set. Now after instancing go to "edit particle" or something like that and the particle editor will pop up as an extra window. There you can edit basically everything that is about the particle systems propreties. There are many tabs and subtabs where the editable parameters are. For exapmle you can set the default emission time and animation loop of your muzzleflash to last really long. For more particle info and tutorials from for example Zachariah scotts youtube channel.

So there shouldn't be need to make every particle separately :)

Plot ideas? I haven't got any good ones now. But for an espionage film I'd recommend some of the dark versions of tf2 maps. That's what I can think of now.

Hello!

The reason why you can't add new skins and change the skins of your models just by dropping the .vtfs into the material folder is because you need to define all the textures before a model is compiled into .mdl. In other words you had to edit the raw .smd model to add extra custom slots for new skins.

In terms of adding new additional skins that can be changed directly in sfm you need to
decompile your model to get the .qc file and add and define the new skins you want to add to the model by editing the .qc and adding "$texturegroup skinfamilies" command.

For detailed info for adding changable skins through .qc visit here for more info:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Multiple_Skins

For detailed info for decompiling and recompiling a model. Visit here:
http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=8971

A video tutorial for decompiling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx_zAhtxjG8

This is an useful trick if you have motivation to do all of those steps. If you don't want to actually add extra changable skins and instead of that you just want to replace some of the ready skins of your model you've got to find your models materials and replace a .vtf skin with your new edited .vtf skin by naming the new skin identically to the original one. Sometimes the HWM models' materials may be shared with player models' material so you need to figure out the material model connections.