Custom Player Model

In my spare time I play a lot of Trouble in Terrorist Town (TTT) with some friends online. This is a social deduction game where each plays takes on a different role with different abilities (I'll go into more detail in another post), all within the game Garry's Mod. The excellent thing about Garry's Mod is the ability to utilise the steam workshop to use custom assets in the game, from custom game logic and roles, to weapons and character models, all of which I intend to explore.

I've experimented with Minecraft modding which is a headache but gave me some good insight into essentially piggybacking off of pre-existing game architecture, which definitely came in handy making a custom player model for Garry's Mod, although it is famously a very janky game with some pretty dodgy code. I had a lot of other stuff to consider first though, namely 3D modelling to a level I hadn't done before. It's worth mentioning off the bat that this model was loosely based on Jesus Christ, stemming from an inside joke amongst the friends I play with./

I've worked on 3D product design in Fusion 360 before, but working in blender is an entirely different experience. I spent days getting familiar with the controls and just as long psyching myself up to commit to this project and make something I can be genuinely proud of rather than a thrown together solution. I ended up sculpting the model for about a week before moving on to porting it to the Source Engine, which Garry's Mod runs on.

The skeleton was by far the trickiest part of this process. Although I've since gotten my head around it, there is very little information or explanation as to how these skeleton rigs should be setup. Even when I imported a reference skeleton from the Source Engine, I still was left for about a week wondering how on Earth it all worked. As it turns out, it functions through the parent point of a bone rather than the bone as a whole, taking in the axes and roll of the point to determine how to align the mesh it is paired with via weight painting. Although this took me far too long to realise, once I understood, I was able to make a refined skeleton for my model within a couple of days, using Half Life Model Viewer (HLMV, a .exe contained in the Garry's Mod files) to verify this.

Then I moved on to the materials. I spent a while considering how I wanted the model to look stylistically, and ended up landing on a sort of painterly style, since I had just finished watching Arcane and adored that art style. Although I dabbled in making clothing, the retopology process was too taxing for me at the time, so I settled for a naked player model with a leaf covering the privates, Adam and Eve style. This left me with quite a visually boring model though, in spite of the painterly aesthetic, so I, with the help of some friends, decided to give him some tattoos. I took suggestions and so far have given him two. One saying 'Dad' in a heart on the left side of his chest, and a little ichthus (the Christian fish symbol) on his butt. I'd like to add more, but I'm wary of the varying levels of detail I've left space for in the UV map, since I heavily prioritised the face and torso so any tattoos on the limbs may wind up either being terribly low quality, distorted, or both.

I'll gradually be adding things to the texture as people suggest/request them. Since it's other players that see this the most, making it as funny as possible for them is sort of my priority.

Finally I had to write the code to allow for the game to recognise the files. The .qc file was something I hadn't expected to be so demanding. The HLMV didn't seem to work in generating code for the .qc file, for things such as hitboxes, so I visualised the hitboxes in the app and did the maths to convert the scale and offset to the appropriate values for the .qc, along with joint restraints, animation inclusions, physics model inclusion and a few other details. It took me a few tries after having either messed something up or completely neglecting aspects of the code, but eventually I wound up with a fully functioning model that I could access and use in the game.

I did some play testing to ensure the animations, hitboxes, and physics all worked, uncovered a few bugs but quickly squashed them and wound up with the final product. I'm gonna keep tinkering with it over time, particularly as I uncover unexpected bugs and other stuff I'd like to tweak, but now that I've got first person arms with proper alignment and animation, simple hair physics, and proper mesh warping, all I have on my immediate to-do list is to add optional cosmetics which I haven't quite cracked yet but once I do, boy oh boy am I gonna take advantage!

Anyway, that's it for now. I might write another post if I make enough changes but until then, I'll start working on custom roles!