I hesitate to post this because answers to previous questions weren't particularly... inspiring, but here goes.

When doing a test run of this gamemode on a dedicated server, a few friends of mine noted that a lot of the wooden props I'd added to the buy menu were breaking way before their health values were depleted.

I did some digging around the Valve Developer Wiki, and found out that prop health (as designated by the base game, not the Flood gamemode) is something baked into the model itself, and can't be edited in the model's compiled form. So I decompiled models/props_junk/wood_crate001a.mdl with Crowbar, added an absurd health value under prop_data in wood_crate001a.qc, changed the directory to props_flood (in both the .qc and the seperate .vmt) to differentiate it from the base prop and recompiled it. My logic was that if the health value of the prop was modified to be that high, it would never gib the prop until the health value designated by Flood hits zero.

Ingame, it works as advertised - the crate can still be gibbed, but only after an absurd amount of damage is applied.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HujbEl734vY

However, when I tried hosting said model on the dedicated server, it showed up on the other end as an error.mdl because the model data wasn't being downloaded/transferred to clients.

The obvious solution (or so I thought) was to pack the models up as a .gma and upload it to the workshop unlisted so it could be downloaded as server content. Upon further inspection of the Steam Workshop rules, however, retail game content cannot be uploaded (and could result in account termination.) Since these models/assets are technically from Half-Life 2, it isn't legal to redistribute them in such a manner.

Is there some easy solution I'm not seeing here? Can model properties like "health" and "mass" be redefined on a gamemode level, rather than decompiling and recompiling the base models? Or do I have to learn 3D modeling from scratch to create custom props that aren't derived from a Valve IP?

inb4 someone posts "unfortunate" under this thread a year from now with no other answers. I get that I'm probably missing something obvious (or something that would be obvious to someone who actually understands/works on gamemodes), but some actual help would be greatly appreciated.