With the largest fanbase of any game ever released and well over 50 awards to it's name, Half-Life by Valve Software is undoubtably one of the greatest games ever. Half-Life's great assets though is it's modding potential and as shown by brilliant titles such as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, there is no question as to why more mods exist for Half-Life than any other game. If you havn't given this game a whirl and one of it's many mods you are definitely missing out!

Report this article Reskinning A Model

So, you want to know how to edit your "Half-Life 1" model and have them show um in your mod? Well this is the tutorial for you!

Posted by bobby0415 on Jul 9th, 2006 digg this super bookmark
Basic Players Modelling.


[page=Introduction]

WARNING: BE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR FILES BEFORE EDITING THEM!!!
WARNING: BE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR FILES BEFORE EDITING THEM!!!

So, you want to know how to edit your "Half-Life 1" model and show up in your mod? Well this is the tutorial for you!
I will tell you how to edit you "Half-Life 1" models!
Just follow this guide closely and you can mod your models the way you want them to be modeled!

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Here are the tools you'll need to start editing your models:
(the programs that are listed here are the programs that I will be using!)

1. Jed's Half-Life Model Viewer - Wunderboy.org

2. The program "Paint" (the one windows gives you) or perferably Adobe Photoshop CS2 (which is not free), either of those will work. (We will use "Paint" in this tutorial, because more people have the "Paint" program than the Photoshop program)

3. A CD installation of half-life (if you have the .mdl's (model file) for hl1 models then you do not need the CD installation, but incase you do not, the CD installation of "Half-Life 1" comes with the .mld's needed for editing, but this tutorial will access those files from the CD installation)

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So now, you should have all the right programs and files available to you. Now all you need to do is edit your models!

First things first: Go to your mod's folder and make a folder called "models", then make a nother file within the "models" file called "player". Now we will be editing "Barney" so make a folder called "barney" in the "player" folder. That is where we will be saving out edited model.
So it should look like this: "Steam\SteamApps\"Your UserName"\half-life\"Your Mod"\models\player\barney"

Now, we will need to load up a .mdl file.

Open up "Jed's Half-Life Model Viewer", click "File > Load Model" and find your models .mdl file (which we will be using barney's .mdl file, for me that is located in "C:\SIERRA\Half-Life\valve\models\player\barney").

Now you should see "Barney" on the screen.

Then click on the "Textures" tab and then click "Export Texture" and save it on your desktop (or somewhere where you can easly load it to edit it, but I will save mine on my desktop). I''ll save mine as "mytexture.bmp".

Ok now, minimize your "Jed's Half-Life Model Viewer" and open your "mytexture.bmp" (or whatever you named it to) and open it with "Paint".

Whenever you get it up with "Paint", zoom in on "Barney's" chest and draw (with the brush) a smiley. Then, again, save it back onto your desktop as "mytexture.bmp" (click "yes" to overwrite)

Once you've done that, open "Jed's Half-Life Model Viewer" back up, go back to the "Textures" tab and click "Import Texture", then open up "mytexture.bmp" and your edited texture should show up with your smiley on it.

Next, click on the "Model Display" tab to view your edited "Barney" model then save it into your "barney" folder in your mods folder (remember that folder we made at the begining of this tutorial, put it in that "barney" folder) and you should be good to go.

P.S. You might want to add the texture file that you saved on your desktop in the "barney" folder so you can easily access both of them.

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Thank you so much for reading this tutorial and I hope it helps out alot of people to get started with modeling!

Feel free to post this anywhere (just give me the credit) and comment on this tutorial anytime you want :)

Comments
srry
srry Dec 31 2006, 12:56am says: Online

Hmmm... This only covers reskinning models, not modeling, or editing the actual shape of the model. It's a useful guide, but the title is a bit misleading.

+1 vote     reply to comment
donuts_ftw
donuts_ftw Jun 23 2007, 12:25pm says:

have to agree w/ srry here

+1 vote     reply to comment
ceriux
ceriux Aug 19 2007, 5:54pm says:

i dont think so it states "REskinning a model"

+1 vote     reply to comment
Joester
Joester Mar 29 2008, 6:37pm says:

Wouldn't you need GCFscape for the steam models?

+1 vote     reply to comment
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