Adventures of a SWG Guild...

DAK

Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2013
Messages
29
Location
Space
So, I started a video series using in game SWG footage (carefully choreographed video and A LOT of editing) with my guild back in the day, based on our characters and other characters from FarStar. Since then I kinda took a break (real life, blah, blah stuff) but in my spare time I for some reason kept pushing to continue the videos in some other way. As sort of a "What it feels like playing SWG" or even a "What if SWG 2.0 existed".

Previous experience with modding games and my "casual digging" though SWG .tre files, I eventually just made my way to modding in a bunch of SWG resources for Source Filmmaker, and taught myself to use it effectively.
This is the result of all that and 2 years of off/on work and non-stop encouragement from my guild mates, and their contributions to the story:

[video=youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sea6BaQgqDY[/video]

Hope you enjoy it.
 

Arioch

Member
Joined
Apr 22, 2014
Messages
123
ok thats pretty cool! any chance youd share the swg assets to save time on importing them all?
 

DAK

Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2013
Messages
29
Location
Space
At some point in time, I'll probably be releasing some of the base models, props, buildings (which so far is only a small percentage of common Tatooine and general SWG things)

Dunno about character models or armors yet....

Its all kind of a disorganized mess right now, so if I get time I'm sure I'll put together a model pack of some kind.
 

Arioch

Member
Joined
Apr 22, 2014
Messages
123
thats awesome. are the models hard to import? and how bad was it to attach animations to the characters? this looks like something i would enjoy doing
 

DAK

Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2013
Messages
29
Location
Space
Not terribly hard, if you keep things consistently organized.

The SWG Armors, clothes and general character appearance models fit almost perfectly around the default Source or "Garry mod" skeleton, if you scale them up by a power of 40 or 30 (can't remember offhand) then adjust the skeleton on frame 1 to fit inside the model, before you weight it. Then export the model from frame 0 position.
Then it's just getting used to compiling charater models. Making it look good depends greatly on how much time you want to spend in photoshop, adjusting the individual texture files, and understanding how SWG shaders work and how you can apply similar effects and even better effects in the source engine...
In theory you could make a few "character models" that were simply just interchangeable armor model parts.

So I guess I could write a tutorial on it some day. ..
 

Affinity

New Member
Joined
Aug 15, 2015
Messages
22
That is a very well done video. Actually quite interesting to watch too. Good job :)
 

Sytner

Administrator
Staff member
Administrator
Joined
Sep 18, 2010
Messages
426
That's pretty cool, look forward to seeing more :).
 

DAK

Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2013
Messages
29
Location
Space
Thanks.  I look forward to making more.  Even if it was a lot of work, for some reason I kind of like doing it.

And I can't thank you enough for posting those height maps, and terrain maps, Sytner. (Even if it's not featured very well in the video because of the setting) I was able to make a nearly-accurate map of Wayfar/Jabba's Palace,  as it is in SWG (aside from the obvious liberties I took with there being a broken down starport, and the whole east side of Wayfar has extra buildings where the harvesters should be.). Also a lot of other resources here on MTG, we're a huge help in making this possible.
 

Timbab

Administrator
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
Joined
Oct 6, 2010
Messages
1,057
Location
Magna Germania
Sytner said:
That's pretty cool, look forward to seeing more :).
I second this.

Really neat effort, must have taken quite a bit with the fairly manual process of pulling assets and making them fit, no?

Looking forward to more, too! :D
 

DAK

Member
Joined
Sep 30, 2013
Messages
29
Location
Space
Timbab said:
Sytner said:
That's pretty cool, look forward to seeing more :).
I second this.

Really neat effort, must have taken quite a bit with the fairly manual process of pulling assets and making them fit, no?

Looking forward to more, too! :D
Believe it or not, pulling the models is not difficult once you have the relative scale, and you've done it enough times. SWG to Source Engine scale is about 40x (I've found this scale matches the average height of Source's humanoid skeleton, when overlapped with armor/clothing/bodyparts). However, in SWG the buildings and structures are a little big, in comparison to the average player height, (obviously, to accommodate SWG's camera),  so structural models, I only scale to 30x.

The only annoying part from the imported models is having to re-apply the normals to the mesh, manually (otherwise it'll catch lighting in odd ways). But that can actually help the model look better, simply by making some flat areas stand out more (and sharp edges more defined) by assigning a different normal to different parts of the mesh.

Textures are simple enough; keep the names consistent as they are, and if using the right importer, the model should keep it's UV mapping intact. And I always look each .dds texture in Photoshop before I export it to .vtf (which is an almost identical format).

The hardest part is trying re-create the shader effects or even improve on them, to make them look good. In some cases SWG's textures, when combined with their intended shader techniques still look pretty good, to this day and in only a few cases have I had to "renovate" some textures. Usually just upscale-ing the normalmap, and creating your own high-def Phong mask makes it look amazingly better, while maintaining that "SWG look".  And then trying to keep that consistent across multiple shaders/textures for individual armor pieces, gets pretty difficult to keep organized.

So basically, it's just time, effort, stubbornness and willingness to learn how it all works.
 
Top Bottom