Halo Maps Forum

Quote: --- Original message by: rododoonceagain

Quote: --- Original message by: Stainless
Hello! Are there any formal tutorials on exporting collision-geometry for Halo CE? Can you model things like pathfinding-spheres, surfaces, and collision materials?

I also have the same question for physics geometry.

I'll tell you how a noob would do it

1) Open 3ds Max
2) Run the GBX model importer and import the bones and the geometry of the thing you want to make the collision model for
3) If you don't know how to make multimaterials like me rename the materials you got with the model to something more appropriate, like "skin", "metal" and so on.
4) Start drawing! Create a box, convert it to poly and assign the multimaterial to it. Once it has its material, start editing it. Add vertices using the "add vertex" function in the "edge" section of the editable poly menu; then create new edges, then move around the edges you got, then start again. You should envelope as good as you can the original shape of the model; too many details aren't good because they take up memory space; too low aren't good as well because they won't stay faithful to the visible geometry; most of the times you can go around with 200\300 vertices (or much less for stuff like covenant crates and similar)
5) Link what you just drew to a bone. REMEMBER: with collision models YOU CAN'T use the skin modifier; for moving parts, you MUST link them to a bone. There's not other way. Why? Because Tool likes it this way, that's why.
6) Repeat step 5 for every bone\frame in the body: draw, link and edit
7) Right click and then convert every poly to editable mesh
8) Assign materials: go through each mesh and select the faces you want to have of a material (with the "face" selection in the editable mesh menu), then assign that material to it. Do it for every material in the scene and assign a material to EACH and EVERY face.
9) Use the JMS exporter to export it to c:\yourhalofolder\data\yourstuff\physics, then run tool and type collision-geometry yourstuff (WITHOUT physics)

Things you should pay attention to:
1) Every face MUST have a material assigned to it
2) If the gbxmodel of the thing to which you want to assign this collision has regions, the collision MUST have these regions as well (there is no need for permutations, though)
To assign regions, do this
http://www.modacity.net/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=122&d=1255646275
to see what regions, if any, your model has, look at the gbxmodel tag in guerrilla
3) Closed world rules: everything you draw MUST be closed, which means that it must have an "inside" and an "outside".
4) Geometry MUST NOT overlap. Vertices should all be separated, faces and edges should not overlap nor meet each other. Should this happen, the collision model will still compile, but you will end up having weird errors in game.
5) DO NOT export an editable poly. If you do, all sort of strange errors will pop up and your collision won't compile