Greetings, fellow Spartans (and Elites!)!

I first discovered this site in 2008 (which is also when I first discovered Halo Custom Edition!). For the next 2-3 years, I had fun playing in various roleplaying and custom servers on various maps, ranging from Extinction and Coldsnap to Yoyorast Island and the RPG Beta series! However, my interest natually, slowly faded away.

Recently, a user by the name of BossVeteran (You might know him or not!) talked about a few mods for Halo PC to help me with inspiration for my SFM work (I'm an amateur Source Filmmaker artist, too!). Having seen stuff like Takedown, Project Lumoria and SOI has convinced me to return to the Custom Edition space once more. I did express with him a desire to one day port my personal Spartan into the game to play around with. While I won't be begging anyone in particular to make a biped model, any help, tips and guides for me would be appreciated!

It's been a long time since I played Custom Edition. Let's hope it's still as fun as I remember it to be, and hope this community is a great one!
Edited by Archangel470 on Aug 6, 2017 at 10:17 AM

I think making bipeds is kind of fun, but if you're new to Halo Custom Edition, here's some tips for making character tags(.biped)

A post about JM-Animation filetypes.

With this game, once you've installed the HEK, you'll have a data\ and tags\ folder. When making a new asset to play with, use the data\ folder first. It should have some basic textures, and a sample level.

Here's an example of how a character folder should look, and where TOOL will look for characters:

data\


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I'm definitely not well-versed enough to help you though but I can at least point out some bare-minimums to start with. So try looking around for better tutorials or hope someone else decides to post something xD

First off, if you don't have 3dsmax8 or older, you'll need a set of maxscripts for the newer versions:

• A JMS exporter(I use bobbysoon's jms exporter 104e)


• A JM-Animation exporter(I use CAD Animation exporter(comes with two scripts, I use the compact version because the regular one doesn't work))


• An animation importer(If you're going to go reverse-engineer//study other people's animations for reference)

Secondly, make sure your character is facing positive X in 3dsmax and its bones start with " Bip01_ "

Though if you ask around, people have made working tools for Maya and Blender

At the very minimum, a character in halo needs a #body node and a #head node for TOOL to recognize and compile it. Here's an example of how that looks in 3dsmax:



If you go back up and look at the first image, you'll see some animations ending in .JMA that have similar sounding names:

:SEAT: :WEAPON: :ANIMATION: .TYPE.

A character's default animation is usually " stand unarmed idle.JMA "
--- This is intentional, because when TOOL compiles a new animation_graph, it uses pre-existing names, the default seat of a biped tag is called stand, the default base weapon pose is called unarmed, and the default animation that plays upon spawning your character into a world is called idle. Always make your idle pose first, then a head-turn graph, if you want the head to turn with the camera.

You don't need ANY animations to spawn a character, so that's one less step to take to test character models

Wellp! That's all I know without making myself sound stupid, hopefully others can help you out
Maybe just start simple, and rig whatever you're going to make to something else's bones, like the cyborg skeleton. So you'll only have to make a model and nothing else

BTW, the ( Before you ask how to edit/make maps - Read This ) topic has a lot of useful posts that go in-depth about texture, tag, and animation requirements. Have a look around.

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Edited by OrangeJuice on Aug 6, 2017 at 05:35 AM
Edited by OrangeJuice on Aug 6, 2017 at 05:41 AM

Boxy send noods.

That's..... quite a lot for me to swallow at the minute. I'll try and wrap my head around it eventually once I get a better understanding on how rigging bipeds work.

I can't post images yet, but here's what my Spartan looks like for those who are curious.

http://pre01.deviantart.net/f388/th/pre/f/2017/195/d/a/homecoming__sfm_portrait__by_archangel470-dbgapnp.jpg

I am both disturbed and curious...