any breakable enviorment guides?

[skyace65]

valve in the past has done breakable enviorments in SFM (meet the medic and crash course intro) are there any guides on how to do this? because i need to break some glass for a video project

[R234]

You can use a glass pane model, then when it's supposed to break swap it for a few glass shard models, animate them flying off, add some particle systems, etc. There's a few of these in SFM already I believe, but if you can model some that's even better. That's how Valve do it by the way, there's no magical "break_wall" console command or anything ;P

[skyace65]

so basically its just model swapping? gonna be hard for the one i want to do. going to do the 2fort controll room(by the inteligence). probobaly just gonna cut out the glass in hammer editor.

also what folder should i look in for the glass shards?

[R234]

If the glass you want to break is part of terrain geometry (and I'm fairly sure the one you're talking about is), you WILL have to edit the map in Hammer to be able to break it, unless you use some sort of camera trick so that people don't see that it doesn't actually break, or the like. Gonna see if I can find some suitable glass gibs...

[skyace65]

no you dont need to do that. although what file location are the SFM tf2 maps located in? because i cant find the directory so i can edit 2fort in SFMs hammer editor

[R234]

Maps are in sourcefilmmaker\tf\maps.

And, I just noticed the windows in 2fort are actually "other entities", not terrain geometry. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because unless you turn their rendering on in Draw Game Entities, they won't show up. Bad, because this render setting cannot be controlled by an animation set, and other ents do not have their own .mdl files that you can import and control in the scene. The only way yo make them disappear as the glass breaks would be to render the scene as an image sequence, half the shot with other ents turned on, the other half with them turned off. This however also causes a few issues, mostly because of those binders on the table next to the window. They're also other ents, so they'll disappear along with the glass.

What would work pretty well though is if you can get your hands on a large glass pane model that you could swap for the glass shards at the right time, as long as you keep other entities off it'll do just fine.

Oh, and there's a few glass shards in the tf2\gibs folder, named glass_shard.mdl to glass_shard06.mdl. They're a bit opaque and heavily cubemapped, so they look more like metal than glass, but that'd be hard to tell if they just fly off quickly enough. As for particle systems, tf\particles\impact_fx.pcf > impact_glass would do the trick, if you put a bunch of them, maybe increase their size a bit, etc.

[skyace65]

Originally posted by R234:

Maps are in sourcefilmmaker\tf\maps.

And, I just noticed the windows in 2fort are actually "other entities", not terrain geometry. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because unless you turn their rendering on in Draw Game Entities, they won't show up. Bad, because this render setting cannot be controlled by an animation set, and other ents do not have their own .mdl files that you can import and control in the scene. The only way yo make them disappear as the glass breaks would be to render the scene as an image sequence, half the shot with other ents turned on, the other half with them turned off. This however also causes a few issues, mostly because of those binders on the table next to the window. They're also other ents, so they'll disappear along with the glass.

What would work pretty well though is if you can get your hands on a large glass pane model that you could swap for the glass shards at the right time, as long as you keep other entities off it'll do just fine.

Oh, and there's a few glass shards in the tf2\gibs folder, named glass_shard.mdl to glass_shard06.mdl. They're a bit opaque and heavily cubemapped, so they look more like metal than glass, but that'd be hard to tell if they just fly off quickly enough. As for particle systems, tf\particles\impact_fx.pcf > impact_glass would do the trick, if you put a bunch of them, maybe increase their size a bit, etc.

thanks for all the help, and i think i can rework the scene so i can hide the glass not being broken with smoke from an explosion.