I'm not talking about the way they're used, im talking about the way they look. Everything looks like rubber to me, especially on the promethean stuff. It's a personal choice here

As for animations, I never said all, I said most. Either Keyframed or Hybrid. Little mocap was used for ingame animation

I thought jumpsuits were the future.

I thought it was bullpups

I thought the future was the same as now, just more shiny.

So, I was reading Elefant's Project Innie thread, where I stumbled upon this post:



I was intrigued by the thought of having a Riot shield based on the Difficulty emblem. Hr3shy made the sword a while back (see here), so I decided that it would also be nice to have the full set.




Note, I haven't made a model in an extremely long time, and this isn't textured (and its not final, im going to send this to Hr3shy to see if he wants to try his hand at making it look nicer, but still, its a nice base to work from I hope).

Also, I've been working more on the reach weapons, whenever I have my little tidbits of time to do so. So you can expect to see those sooner than later
Edited by R93_Sniper on Aug 12, 2013 at 07:38 AM

This is so awesome you should make a varient that has a elite head nailed to it

Looks like it's a lot more curved to me...

It looks great but I noticed with shield weapons it's hard to line up the actual shield with the first person animation. So technically it would be pretty difficult to know if your shield would protect you or not unless you play in third person.
Was this just for the kicks or do you plan on putting it in-game?

agreed

I suck at making anything look round ish (the inner part looks rounded in the picture, but not in the model as you can see). One day I will make it work, one day




It was mainly for the kicks, but if I can actually get Hr3shy to make it better, I'll put it ingame (though I'll need to make 3P animations for it and figure out how to make it repel bullets and junk)

Alright, since i havent put an update in a while, and because i've been looking at people making less than amazing shaders recently, i think it might be a nice idea to make a very basic shader tutorial, adding in something that i stumbled upon some time ago and think should be known.

**WARNING**
I am by NO means an expert on shaders, nor am I very able to answer questions concerning the topic. I'm just trying to get some basic knowladge out there for those who dont know how. It is very possible that some of the information will be innacurate, so don't expect to rely on this 100%. Also note that this is for Vanilla Halo Shaders

So lets start with the most commonly used shader type as i see it, the .shader_model type.
You'll start off with something like this



You'll first want to know what your material is made out of, and then change the shader type accordingly. By default, you'll notice that everything seems to be made out of dirt. you can change that by clicking this button and changing the material type



Nextly, you would want to actually set your bitmaps. You'll be working with the following area of your shader.



You can Bitmaps that are used come in 4 basic varieties: Diffuse, Multipurpose, Detail, and Cubemaps. Lets quickly break down what each of the four are

Diffuse: Basic Color Information. These are the "main" bitmaps used and act as the base bitmap.
Multipurpose: A Bitmap that suffices for 4 different purposes, based upon the RGBA Channels. I'll go more indepth on this a bit further on.
Detail: Bitmaps that add extra detail to a bitmap, as the name suggests. Called bump maps when dealing with weapons (Detail Bumps to be exact).
Cubemaps: Cubemaps are used to show reflected detail on models. They're split into 6 different images (formatted in a way that it looks like you cut open a cube and layed it flat, thus cubemap).

I'll be using the Halo: Reach Magnum as an example for this.
Here's the Bitmaps that come with it by defautl
Diffuse

Specular

Normal


Now, you may be asking "But Sniper, you said we'll be using Diffuse, Multipurpose and Detail Mapping, what are we gonna do with Specular and Normal Maps?"
Answer? You convert them.

Lets start with Specular -> Multipurpose
As i said before, i was going to go a bit more indepth as to how multipurpose maps work. Multipurpose maps use the RGBA Channels in a bitmap to work in a lot of different details. Heres what each channel does

Red: Detail Mask
Green: Self-Illumination
Blue: Specular/Reflection Properties
Alpha: Color Change (Abbreviated as CC, a lot)

You'll want to use a program that can handle multiple channels to work with Multipurpose maps. I use Photoshop, but Paint.Net and GIMP i hear are able to do so as well. Now, Open the Specular map in your program of choice, it should look like this



Since the entire gun except for the handle is made out of a shiny metal material, you would want to select the handle, then invert the selection. Fill in the area outside the handle with white. You can keep what's there, though. You should end up with this in your Blue channel.



Since the Magnum's self illumination is pretty much only along the small lights on the sides, you would make those areas white, while the rest of the gun black in the green channel. You should end up with something like this in the end



And Now you have the Red channel. Since we want the entire model to be affected by the converted detail map, we'll make the whole thing white. I dont need to show a picture for that because that serves no purpose.

Now you have the Alpha/CC Map. Even though the Reach Magnum doesnt actually have a Color Change, i'm going to put make the sights have a bit of color change just for the sake of this tutorial. Same with the rest, highlight what you want, black it out, white out the rest. Your finished Multipurpose would look like this



Now that you have the multipurpose done, time to convert the normal map into a detail map. Open up the Normal map, and go to the channels, you'll notice something interesting.



The Red and Green maps are Greyscale? Thats interesting, Let's see what they look like




They look pretty close to what a Detail map should look like, but they dont seem to be precise to the normal map. So, what do we do? We extract them and put them on seperate layers. Go to the Red Channel, and Copy the entire thing into a seperate layer in the RGB Channel, same with the Green Channel, You'll get something like this



Now, what do you do to make them look like a normal map? Simple. Overlay one onto the other, and it should work out nicely



Now, Lets compare that to the normal map



The reason this is possible is because i learned that the red and green channel determine how much detail is to be applied to a bitmap based on lighting. Red is Vertical, Green is Horizontal. Blue Channel controls depth of the detail, but it's set local to the model itself, so it can be ignored since it doesnt make too much of an extensive difference.

Note: Normal maps have a tendancy of not using Power of 2 Dimensions, best idea would be to upsize them so that they are the correct size.

Now that all of that is done, we can place our bitmaps in the appropriate shader slots in Guerilla after we run them through tool



Now, lets scroll down to the bottom of the shader where we can find our cubemap properties. I've already prepared a cubemap for this from H3, but if you want to know how to set up your own cubemaps, you should look at Maniac's Tutorial, he was the one show showed me. Anyways, since we want the magnum to have a white-ish reflection, we'll be giving the tint colors 1 in all the slots. However, since we want it to be a bit duller, we'll set the brightness to .5 in it's appropriate slot. You should get this.



Since im Lazy, I used CaptainVidya's Pistol as a base. Heres what it'll look like ingame (note, i did some extra stuff including having transparency maps on the decal maps)




Hope this tutorial was informational!

Any progress on the tutorial about porting Reach content (I think you said something about bipeds)?

That's the wrong way to use fakebumping, and you forgot to flip the channels in the normal map if you wanted to fakebump. The details are inverted right now.

One quick question though, does the metal material types reflect bullets?

Depends of the projectile tag... Or is it the projectiles dammage_effect tag... I can't remember... Goodnight.

Well, I shot at a dead biped with a MA5B and got killed by ricocheting bullets.

I refute thee because i've done things where i shoot bipeds/weapons and they're dirt up until i change that field



If you can show me how to do otherwise it would be extremely appreciated
Edited by R93_Sniper on Oct 4, 2013 at 01:36 AM

That happens with every stock gun except the sniper rifle, as it's projectile tag allows it to "overpenertrate" every biped feature.

Ill edit this post in a second with a picture... When I get out mah laptop.


Edited by hobbet360 on Oct 5, 2013 at 01:26 AM

I work in the reach huds
credits: Slipknot, Lonewolft, RMT Smok3, Benjamin MK III, Leonox97
....


and others:

You posted that in the wrong thread.

DMR has 3x zoom BTW.
Edited by Dumb AI on Oct 5, 2013 at 05:08 PM

Waffles, I am not too sure what you mean.Sniper is right that you need to change the "dirt" to something else or the material will react as dirt. Maybe you are meaning something other than that?

Actually, waffles is right. Shader_model's, the material means nothing, since a shader_model will never be used for collision. Only materials that are accepted as BSP materials will even check what their material is. Shader_models can only be used on gbxmodels, which are render only. IF you have a BSP that uses something like a shader_enviroment, THEN you need to worry, because unless you explicitly told that BSP to use that shader as a render only, then it is also going to create a collidable area that references that shader. If for whatever reason you do not believe me or waffles, go make a scenery that only has a gbxmodel; you wont be able to shoot it.

Please :)

Ahh shader "model". I should have read that.

You need to use the direct link to make the image show up.



Or just "Right Click" on the image and select "copy image URL".
Edited by hobbet360 on Oct 5, 2013 at 09:53 PM

What have you done, Jonhlex?!


Edited by Dumb AI on Oct 6, 2013 at 10:04 AM

This (Thanks Edwar Ayala (Slipknot) for the pistol. )

Um, I think you should get larger images.

From what I can see, you used Reach textures on a custom model made by a guy called "Moses" or custom textures on the Reach model. Either way, it looks bad.
Edited by Dumb AI on Oct 6, 2013 at 11:48 AM

HAH. What gave you that idea Dumb AI? There's no mismatched textures on that pistol model at all! It's the latest fad, get with the times, buddy!

So this doesn't look weird to you...

Fads can go to the afterlife.
Edited by Dumb AI on Oct 6, 2013 at 11:49 PM

You are ignoring what the diffuse maps look like on that model.

EDITTED To SAY LOL

REMOVED!
Edited by hobbet360 on Oct 7, 2013 at 01:59 AM

There needs to be some sort of sarcasm tag, although I have a feeling that Dumb AI could also be sarcastic...

I wasn't but I could be.

I would appreciate you guys limiting the amount of stupid you're putting on my thead.

Destroyer/Killer/Whateveryouwanttocallyourselfnow, Go away. You're still a nuisance and refuse to change, so i refuse to have your stupidity here.

Johnlex, wrong thread. Fix those diffuse maps, because your textures are messed up.

Bottletopman, that your tone is oozing with either sarcasm or blunt force trauma. If the prior, then stahp, if the latter, my condolences.

Also Dumb AI, The whole thing about porting content was just very basic stuff to get you started on being able to do ports. It was namely going to be vehicles because vehicle animations are 900x easier than any other type of animation. The Normal -> Detail map conversion was a big thing i wanted to show you guys because that helps to get normal mapping into a usable state for vanilla modders. The rest is really just scaling and repositioning.

Xiao, You said something about my fakebumping not working, where's that fix of which you speak D: