Blog 0: Half Life 2 Vehicles in Halo 3
(image of the Half Life 2 buggy and muscle car into the Halo 3 engine pipeline with Master Chief from the Halo franchise in said vehicles)
For those who have already seen this a million times from me, i promise this is the last time i'll milk this little project of mine.
For those who haven't seen this, this is basically the Half Life 2 vehicle roster in Halo 3, except the airboat, i still need to figure that one out.
The process wasn't exactly easy, and one funny little problem that i caused the first time i was working on this.
Don't worry, it isn't a virus.
Turns out, stupid idiot little me deleted all the markers in Blender that each indicate the vehicle tag's wheel position, turret position, headlight position, etc etc.
But after doing everything exactly right, i got something that, looked like a vehicle. No textures, floppy wheels, but it was something to get started on.
Then another problem came, not the wheels since i still need to rework that, it was master chief's foot positioning, i asked the Halo Mods discord (super helpful community go check them out <3) for help and one guy said to rework the animations, but then i started digging around the model in blender and found markers related to the passenger's foot positioning as well as the driver's and also hand positioning around the steering wheel, this saved me a HUGE amount of time as i did not want to do animation (mainly because i suck at them), these markers we're very convenient when i found them at the right time.
Then came texture work, it was fairly simple, all i needed to do is extract Valve's buggy texture as well as the Jalopy (we'll get to that soon), extract them to crowbar, align them in blender using materials, convert them to a .tiff file using Photoshop, and making a bitmap and shader using guerilla.
Pretty straightforward if i may say so myself.
Then came the time to polish everything, now when i say polish i mean tweaking a bit of things, removing the additional headlights from the warthog base armutare, and make it functional.
Now if you know Halo 3 you might know that the Warthog in game is destructible, The Jalopy And Buggy, are not.
I didn't really wanna fiddle around the models as i might fuck up something in the model and just didn't wanna deal with it, so i just left them there.
Jalopy Time
"Then came Jalopy."
The Jalopy was kind of the same process as porting the Half Life 2 buggy into Halo 3.
Except this time i didn't have to do much work around the wheels and suspension bones.
Basically doing the same steps, getting the Warthog base armature and model, align them with the armuture, do the regions, port over to test, do texture work, polish, and done.
And that was it, all (the two vehicles you use on the ground because i'm too lazy to port the airboat or mudskipper if you're richter overtime) of the vehicles from Half Life 2's vehicle roster we're ported over to Halo 3 succesfully, sadly without destruction physics.
If you want the tutorial i used to make this happen, check it out here. (ty rx king and the halo mods community <3)