I tried searching the tutorials section of the forum (which linked me to Valve's wiki, which didn't have the information I needed), but I can't find any information on how to decompile a model and get it into 3d studio max. would anybody be able to help me?

That might help:

http://www.chaosincarnate.net/cannonfodder/cftools.htm

The mdl decompiler to generate the smds + the Max importers should get you going.

cheers. :)

Be warned though - when you import a model it creates a bone for the mesh. An example would be importing a character model where you'd have all the ValveBiped bones and then one called "Male_05" as a root bone.

When you evelope + export you'll find the SMD has a root bone for you new mesh, the root bone from the old mesh + the original skeleton. e.g

Bone 0 = New Mesh Root Bone
Bone 1 = Original Imported Model Root
Bone 2 = ValveBipedRig.Bip0
etc.


This causes problems when re-compiling as bone indexes are out by one and even if you delete the orignal Root you end up with


Bone 0 = New Mesh Root Bone
Bone 2 = ValveBipedRig.Bip0
etc.

So Bone 1 is missing. If you try and renumber manually

Bone 0 = New Mesh Root Bone
Bone 1 = ValveBipedRig.Bip0
etc.

you'll get assertion errors as your vertex bone indexes are out too. :(

The only way I found to fix it was to:

a) Import the decompiled mode.
b) Delete the extra imported mesh root bone.
c) Rig/Envelope as normal.
d) export as SMD
e) reimport the newly exported SMD
f) export as SMD again.

That *usually* fixes the bone index problem although be warned its often VERY hard to get a complex model like a player model to re-compile correctlywith the decompiled QC. If possible, use the QC, QCI and related files that come with the SDK samples.

thanks for the info, here's hoping I can pull it off right. :)

Originally posted by Makabi Gafera
thanks for the info, here's hoping I can pull it off right. :)

Pervert. :eek:

maybe, but not when it comes to things like this. :p