I’ve seen textures that I can apply to simple cubes in order to get bookcases, file cabinets, bulletin boards, and the like. The desk visible in the photo comes with the game. The next big “proof of concept” for me is to import models of ready-made furniture. The wood panel walls are actually too fancy for the generic office settings, but I do want to create a courtroom at some point, so I don’t mind experimenting with this design scheme. I’m not sure how to adjust her behavior, but at least she fits in slightly better in the realistic office setting I’m trying to create. I took the gun away from the NPC Alyx, so now she’s a little less aggressive. I’ll have to keep looking if I want to use some healthy trees. The tree visible outside the window comes with Half-Life 2, and I guessed correctly that it was possible to change its “skin” to add a few leaves. In this model, I added a ceiling, though now the lights are just emanating from nowhere. With that under my belt, I downloaded a pack of hundreds of new textures, including the tile floor, panel walls, and wood beam that you can see in the image. When that runs out, I’ll have to take a look at open-source archiving tools. So I had to upgrade to the 30-day trial version of Power Archiver. While I already had a tool that was supposed to deal with “rar” files, when I decompressed the file the target folder was always empty. (Those textures came in an “ rar” archive. After several hours and several tries, I finally figured out where the custom textures should go, and how to find them within the 3D editor when I wanted to use them. The comments at the end of the tutorial indicate that I’m not the only one suffering from similar problems. I found a few texture packs that expand the number of materials available to Hammer (the 3D world tool I’m using), but I was having trouble following a tutorial to load just one custom texture. The availability of appropriate images really does affect what items I choose to work on. While I don’t want to spend forever fiddling with images, I began to realize last week that the image files really aren’t just window dressing. Half-Life 2 is set in a grungy urban dystopia, so the image files that depict stock materials (wood panels, plaster ceilings, brick walls) all look pitted and rough. I’d been going crazy because I had turned off “helpers,” which means that I couldn’t see the blue sphere that all the tutorials mentioned was supposed to mark the site of the hinge. ENBs reshade etc.My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree ( Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)Ī week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I’ve made some good progress.Įarly last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. too detailed world textures create obvious patterns spread over large surfaces breaking immersion, in real life you don't see all that constant detail "noise" and a spot of dirt doesn't look like another spot of dirt 10m away so it's better to just see a "blurry brown patch" on the ground really photo realistic textures look worse because of that 3d model/texture shock explained above but also because they lack the "world vision" the original artist had, it's a job to create consistent immersive worlds, you can't put random stuff in it My personal view and advice on retextures :
more than 300hrs of "work" to get my current skyrim as it is 17 years of modding elder scrolls and 3d fallouts