This weekend I made my first attempt at making a weapon. Modeling it was no problem but getting it in game was a pain in the ass.
The Aptly named Dream Crusher Left me feeling rather discouraged for most of the weekend. I found several tutorials that were either for the wrong modeling program or assumed I had more knowledge about the one I was using than I currently had. Trying to go strait to a weapon model ended up being out of the question for me so first I followed a tutorial to make my model a more generic physics prop, this allowed me to learn how to make a collision model and adjust physics weights. After getting my Model in game I went for a simple tutorial that showed me how to replace a default Half-Life 2 weapon. Since my mallet is a melee weapon I chose to replace the Crowbar. (Later i will edit the way the weapon works in the code to knock enemies around more) when I first loaded it up in game I was greeted with a comical result, the mallet decided to stick to my butt and was poking out of my head like a hat
After much befuddlement I was able to hack around the ideas in the broken tutorials to get a working version of the model attached to the right place in my hand. The tutorials said to make a bone named the same as the one in my characters hand model. but when I exported the bone didn't want to do anything for me to orient the model. So eventually i figured out to name the model the same as the hand bone and then pretend the origin was where the hand bone was. Doing it this way finally enabled me to get the hammer oriented in the right direction in my characters hand. Now came my second problem, the Collision model didn't seem to want to match up to the other brush work. For some reason it rotates itself 180 degrees in two axis. God knows why, perhaps Valve just wants to be difficult, or maybe the stupid hand bone likes to mess shit up.
Either way, I am Happy to have my hammer in game and I can't wait till I figure out how to animate my character properly to be able to smash stuff in my game with the Dream Crusher!
