Animation, Maya, & Valve Modeling, Exporting, and Compiling Feb 10 th 2006

Create a Material In Photoshop, create a 512x512 image –File->New –Set the image size Change the Width and Height fields to 512 pixels –Edit your image! –Save the image to ‘img.tga’ File->Save a Copy Save to ‘ /materialsrc/’ –I recommend using GIMP for image editing!

TGA File Format TGA is short for Targa (aka Truevision), a popular non-proprietary image format favored by Valve TGA files can be saved with a fourth channel, called Alpha channel, which usually defines transparency However, VMF shaders use the alpha channel A shader is a piece of software that instead of executing on the CPU, it executes on the GPU There are two types of shaders: Pixel shaders and Vertex shaders Half-Life 2 uses Microsoft's High Level Shading Language (HLSL)

Compile the Material Compile to a VMT and a VTF Again, you can download VTFEdit, which is a GUI for authoring textures – We will use the ‘vtex.exe’ utility This utility can be found under –C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\ \sourcesdk\bin Here is the command we will execute –Go to Start->Run –Type in ‘cmd’ (command prompt) –Move into your ‘ /materialsrc/’ directory –vtex.exe –mkdir –shader VertexLitGeneric img.tga –Look under ‘ /materials/’ for the VMT and VTF

Maya and Animation Yesterday, we created a static object in Maya and learned how to export and compile it for the SMD and MDL file formats needed by Valve Today, we will create a joint for that static model and produce a single animation You will first need to construct a ‘base pose’ for an object that you want to animate –We already did this with our static object yesterday You need to then create a joint/bone hierarchy (called a skeleton)

Base Pose & Skeleton

Animation & Exporting Follow the general modeling and exporting guidelines from our last lecture, and also from the following URL – We are going to use the model we exported yesterday We will create a separate file for each animation that we want to use in the game Valve stores just one file with the base pose and joint hierarchy, and all other animation files only have the skeleton for a particular animation I will put a tutorial up soon regarding how take already existing HL2 characters and change their ‘skin’ (texture files for the face & body) –‘Cheapest’ way to get a custom look and feel for your game

Animation

Maya: Add a Joint Hit Space->Skeleton->Joint Tool Increase the radius so you can see it, say to a vale of 50 Click on the joint and hold ‘Ctrl’ and click on pCube1 Hit Space->Skin->Bind Skin->Rigid Bind You can also do smooth skinning, but it will not help us out much in this example

Maya: Animate the Object Select the pCube1 object Hold Shift and press ‘W’, ‘E’, and ‘R’ Go to 30 on the time bar, this will be how we are selecting our 30 fps Change the rotate values to 45, 45, and 45 Right click in the Transform Attributes box and hit Set Key You can now run it and watch it animate

Maya: Export the Animation Go to File->Export SMD Options Turn on ‘export Animation smds’ under the ‘Export’ tab Go to ‘Path Settings’ tab and hit ‘default’ Make sure that ‘smd/qc Path’ is set to – /modelsrc/RotCube.smd Make sure that ‘texture Path’ is set to – /materialsrc/

Exporting the Animation Go to the ‘Animations’ tab Type in ‘Rotating’ in ‘sequence Name’ Type in ‘0’ for ‘sequence start’ and ’30’ for ‘sequence end’ Type in ‘loop fps 30’ in ‘add on end’ Hit ‘OK Settings’ Hit ‘Full Compile’

SMD Files Under ‘ /modelsrc/’ you should have a few SMD files and a QC RotCube.qc => File that will be used to specify how we compile into a MDL RotCube.smd => Reference model RotCube_idle.smd => Idle animation RotCube_phy.smd => Physics model RotCube_Rotating.smd => Animation file

Compile to a MDL We will use the studiomdl.exe utility This is in the same bin directory as the vtex.exe material compile utility To run studiomdl.exe and compile our SMD files into a MDL that we can run in our mod, type –studiomdl.exe RotCube.qc The result is automatically copied over into – /models/

Valve Model Viewer In the Source SKD menu, launch ‘Model Viewer’ Go to File->Load Model Your model should appear as ‘RotCube’

Hammer & your Animation Add a ‘prop_dynamic_override’ entity Double left click on it Go to the ‘world model’ keyvalue Press on Browse Find your model Name the entity ‘myobject’ Create a ‘logic_timer’ entity Change the ‘Refire Interval’ to 5 (seconds) Go to the ‘outputs’ tab Click ‘add’ Select ‘onTimer’ (the output) Find the ‘myobject’ (the entity to effect) Select ‘SetAnimation’ (the input) Put ‘Rotating’ in the ‘with a parameter override of’ textbox