#i wanted to add a cosmetic. it's not in sfm

[renthewerecatboi]

~everything i want to do is fucking impossible~

[triggerthreestrikes]

Fun fact: an as of now hiatused project of mine (that’s college student for never going to see the light of day) I had a series concept similar to this.

So the story would be told from the sentient ragdolls/tf2 characters POV. They have limited awareness of the medium and fourth wall and all that and know about players, and how some players *cough* gunslinger and badwater *cough* torture and force the ragdolls to be posed. However, most of the videos are spent watching the player of their gmod just…doing gmod things. Screwing around with props, making wiremod contraptions blowing himself up by complete accident while using explosive mods

Eventually the ARG would have the characters find a discarded camera that has videos of the player making the characters. Posing them for art and sfm posters. They would find how he posted all of these making of videos and how none of them got very many views, maybe a few comments calling his characters cringe. they would learn how he eventually gave up making anything with them, but kept the videos up, kept the ragdolls around, all because while he gave up on having any sort of following, the characters were too special to him to delete their saved dupes. He’d put them up while he screwed around in sandbox to make himself feel less alone.

It wasn’t a glitch in the system or some other ambiguous reason these ragdolls gained sentience, it was the love and care and work that went into learning how to properly facepose, add cosmetics, make better lighting, adding props and detail that gave them their sentience. This was as far as I got in the concept stage.

[xxx-mundiemudsnapper-xxx]

how do you get tf2 models into blender? if you don't mind the asking

youre gonna need a few things first: - blender source tools (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Blender_Source_Tools) (link tells you where to get it and how to install it!)

- crowbar (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/CrowbarTool) (link goes to the steam page for crowbar where you can download it for free!)

- gcfscape (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/GCFScape) (link goes to the valve developer wiki page for gcfscape! seriously this wiki is super helpful when you get started with source modding, absolutely a priceless resource if youtube videos aren't your style of learning, plus it has all the epic little links to download stuff)

i also suggest notepad++ or geany for writing qc files, but thats only if you intend on porting the stuff youve made back into source!

once youve got those, you can use gcfscape to extract the model you want from the tf2 files, then you use crowbar to decompile the .mdl file! once the .mdl file is decompiled, you can import the .smd files into blender! blender source tools also lets you export both smd and dmx!! (although for tf2, just use SMD)

i also suggest getting vtfedit to convert the texture files from the source format (vtf/vmt) to something like a tga or png, generally i save as tga then use another program to save the tga as a png bc vtfedit acts really weird when saving pngs so yeah!

once you have your models and textures, do whatever you like! to convert back to source and use in tf2/gmod/sfm you have to learn how to write qc files which im still figuring out, but learning to do source stuff takes time! qc files are kind of scary at first, but crowbar helps a lot with the bone definitions and stuff, the best way is really just to decompile models similar to what you're making and dissect the qc file yourself to see how it works

should you want to make a prop or ragdoll, you'll have to have your model, an animation (literally just the skeleton in its default pose, it doesnt have to be fancy and props dont even technically require bones) and a physics model, but that's another can of worms entirely dependent on what youre making!

stuff like tf2 cosmetics that get bonemerged dont need physics models since theyre just attaching to another model, they can have jigglebones and faceposing and stuff, really the skys the limit if u know what ur doing!

sorry this got a little long, but please feel free to send in other questions or even add me on discord for further help! ^^/