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I already have an SFM port of Whitemane, yes, but I decided to port her myself so that I can set up bodygroups how I like them, and to make sure the weight painting is within Source's limitations. Real glad I'm doing this, because her weight painting needs a lot more work than I realized. A boat-load of fine detail would've been wiped by Source, and her weight painting is sloppy, frankly. Lots of stray vertices assigned to the wrong bone, and her neck and shoulders are a mess.
So, I've been working on her for a few weeks, and need no clue how much more time.
Done: Split model into pieces for bodygroups; convert textures to Source; delete unused bones and add missing bones to skeleton; clean up weight panting (almost done).
She's missing bones in her fingers, so I added and weight-painted the missing ones. Also added twist bones to her wrists.
The biggest piece of work has been her face. She has bones in her face, but you'd have to wipe a lot of the detail on that weight painting to bring it into Source's limitations. Especially around her lips. Rather than do that, I've redone the weight painting on her face so that I can use the bones to pose her face in the shapes you need for vertex animations. Face bones need a last pass, then I can do most of the work on the bones, rather than sculpting all those shapes by hand.
To do: create vertex animations for Source; set up data for EyeRefract eyes shader; build missing hair; port animations to Source.
No idea how long it will take to create the vertex animations, which is why I have no clue how much more time I need.
For her eyes, she already has half-spheres for eyes, so her model is good to go. For the textures, I can use textures from L4D2. Need to edit only the diffuse texture to match the colours on Whitemane's original textures. (She has five tints).
As you can see in the image above, her hair cuts off just above where it goes under her chapeau. That's why the thing never falls off in-game. Her scalp is there, so I can use that as reference for the shape of her hair. If adding her missing hair works out, I'll add a bone to her chapeau so you can pose/animate it.
I'll drop her on the Steam Workshop and SFMLab once she's done.
Uhm… yeah. Saying I'm failing to keep track of time is an understatement.
tl;dr: I'm struggling with my modding work, and said modding work is VTMB all the way down.
I mentioned before that DDLullu was working on an updated MDL Formatter for VTMB that can port facial animations. I spent most of March testing that. Was working with one of my custom Malk models, and then ported Alyx Vance to VTMB. That was quite a bit of work. Despite being from around the same time and on a version of the same engine, Alyx does not fit on any skeleton from VTMB. Had to adjust her model and redo some of her weight painting to make her work.
Short version - there are still issues with porting facial animation. Long version - While the model and their flex controllers are porting to VTMB, the engine is not using the flex controllers correctly. How the Source engine works is like this - the model has vertex animations, that Source calls Flexes. There are then Flex Controllers, sliders that you use to trigger the Flexes. You use a program called Faceposer to make presets for facial expressions, and phonemes (the shapes your mouth makes to make sounds). It looks like this:
This is Alyx with VV's presets. (Were fortunate that .txt versions of all the presets shipped with VTMB. They're in the 'Expressions' folder, inside pak007.vpk. Also, Troika's descriptions for the facial expressions are hilarious). These presets are saved in files with the extension .vfe. It's just a list that tells the engine "for this preset, set these sliders to these values". The problem is that VTMB's .vfe files don't work with a custom model. I'm not sure if they're using the wrong value, applying the value to the wrong controller, or both, but the character's face is distorting. .vfe files made with later versions of Faceposer don't work in VTMB. They crash the game in fact.
I passed along everything I learned to DDLullu. He knows how to edit a custom .vfe file to get it working in VTMB. I hope he can either teach others how to do it, or make a converter to automate the process. I'm… waiting for him to post to the forums again. I'm told he's always worked like this. Doesn't respond to DM's or pings. The only thing you can do is make a public forum post and hope he responds to it. Saying I passed things along is actually wrong. I posted everything to the forum in reply to DDLUllu's previous posts, and all I can do is keep waiting.
I spent most of April putting together this gallery of Beta screenshots from VTMB. There's nothing earth-shattering in there, but there are quite a few things that were changed or removed since Troika took the screenshot. Fascinating, if you like seeing how a project changed over time.
Other than that, I've been struggling with work in Blender. Also lost over a week last month to a bad cold that left me too fatigued to work. I keep getting stumped on how to build the geometry for this base body for a Fledgling that I've been working on forever. It just doesn't want to click, no matter how much I look at anatomy references. It's like… have you ever watched a movie or show with the sound off? You can see what people are doing, but you don't know why. You can guess what's going on, but you're going to miss things, and you're going to get things wrong. That's the best comparison I can think of.
Another problem I keep hitting is the level of detail. Keeps happening that for a line or a loop, it looks like there are not enough vertices. But if I add even one more vertex, now there are too many. It makes we want to scream. Feel like I should be working in Quality Assurance, not Development. It's easier (and thus I'm better at it) to edit something than to make it from scratch. But I work too slowly to be reliable. I'll never work in the pro industry. Ah well.
Been chipping away at the palm of her hand. Some days I feel like I'm getting things figured out. Some days I keep hitting a wall. Some days I lock up and don't even open Blender at all. I'll make a proper post about how I've changed my approach (again) and my progress once I have a bigger chunk of her model done.
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Here's a large gallery of Beta screenshots from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.
A lot of these images are technically not Beta screenshots. They're from the released game, or a version close to it, and they don't feature anything not in the released game. The point is that most of them are screenshots taken by Troika themselves. I say "most" because I cannot prove for sure that all the pics I got from the Steam and GOG pages were taken by Troika. These are the largest resolution versions of everything I could find. I was unable to track down versions without third-party website's watermarks on them for everything, unfortunately.
Be warned that some of these screenshots show excessive violence. Blood, guns, and people being set on fire. Oh, and the body horror of the monsters Andrei created.
Something I learned while scouring the 'net for all this is that, back in the 2000's, game devs split screenshots like these between Online Only (for websites) and Print Only (for magazines). They made a habit of giving different screenshots to each group. I was unable to find a lot of the Print Only screenshots, so included scans of some magazine articles that include those shots.
archive.org was absolutely invaluable in recovering a lot of this. I sifted through most of the links from here.
Also went through this collection of articles on Bloodlines.
Lots of web- and reverse-image searches later, this is the most complete collection I could put together. Most of the original file names are lost. I named them Date-Location-Character(s). "UD" stand for "Unknown Date". The dates are the date on which they were uploaded to a website, which is presumably close to when Troika first released them.
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Just finished a major update to all my Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines mods!
Every character gets first person hands (which, while they look like the same hands from the third person model, are actually all brand new models specifically for this update!)
Sunshine - Tremere
Luna - Gangrel
Mads - Malkavian
Parker - Ventrue
Zivot - Nosferatu
Veronica - Toreador
Kit - Brujah
As I went through this project, I kept learning more about how to set up different effects, so while not featured in the above video, this update also adds reflective effects to the parts of the characters that are intended to be shiny or metallic, where previously only Kit had these effects.
Interestingly, I also figured out how to make "glowy" textures by making things reflect a solid color, rather than the environment, so not only do all characters get to have glowy eyes in their final outfits like Kit already does, but now Mads gets the glowsticks I desperately wanted her to have before!
Also in that picture, you can see she finally has real shoulders! Previously, to save time on bone weighting woes I just kept the arms as separate meshes from the torso, but as is often the case with things I keep putting off, it turned out to not actually be that scary!
In addition to giving everyone real shoulders, I also gave everyone real wrists by connecting their hands to their arms in the same way! (there are some exceptions, not every character has their arms out, so not every character benefits from connected wrists.
This also gave me an opportunity to fix Sunshine's toothpick arms, because in the original upload, her arms were crazy levels of skinny.
And I'd like to close this off with a slight rant, because I have discovered while working on these mods that the assets for this game are really just thrown together wildly. Like, the file names for the malkavian models are not consistent across outfits, but much weirder than that, the first person arms are split across two models for each character. The main model is used for things like handling weapons or lock picking, but there's a second model just for casting spells - and THAT model has a default pose that looks like the lock picking animation, but clearly isn't the one from in-game. Which is SO wild. Like - y'all know what T-Posing is, right? Even the default arms have something kinda like that, with the fingers splayed out in a wide pose, which would not only make it easier for artists to work on them, but would also make it easier to pose them for animating.
but the spellcasting hands have a default pose that looks like THIS. Weirdly curled fingers included. Whenever they were animating spells, they had to start with this, and I cannot imagine why.
Hey there. Just want to say, I see you link to my Formatter guide in the description of your mods. Appreciate it. <3
Yeah, Bloodlines assets are a mess like that. As it so happens, here's a video explaining some of why that is. That's Tim Cain, one of Troika Games' founders.
About the first-person hands: the clan-specific hands are actually a feature of the the Unofficial Patch Plus. In the original game, only Nosferatu have unique hands. The other six clans share a model, and the male hands are saved with that broken rest pose. Far as I can tell, looking at the models/textures, the female and Nosferatu hands were made by editing the male hands. There's actually only one skeleton.
The casting animations are also something in the data, but not used in the original game. There's only the one model, which is a copy of the messed up male hands. Pain to deal with that when modding the hands.
You've obviously already found a way to sort it out for the casting hands, but lemme share how I handled it. I copied the rest pose from the female skeleton to the male skeleton, and worked with that straightened out skeleton. When all the models were done, I attached the casting hands to the straightened out skeleton, then copied the broken pose back.
Oh hi! Thank you very much for making the guide, I was very suddenly overcome by the desire to make custom characters last year, and if not for your documentation I never in a million years would've gotten through it
That's all genuinely really interesting, with regards to the hands! I did kinda realize that having unique hands had to be something for the unofficial patch, nosing around in the base game files I obviously didn't find any, so I probably should've connected those dots sooner, but it's really cool how everything shakes out in the patch
Ultimately, it was really satisfying on my end as well to pick through all of it in order to get everything working
Just finished a major update to all my Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines mods!
Every character gets first person hands (which, while they look like the same hands from the third person model, are actually all brand new models specifically for this update!)
Sunshine - Tremere
Luna - Gangrel
Mads - Malkavian
Parker - Ventrue
Zivot - Nosferatu
Veronica - Toreador
Kit - Brujah
As I went through this project, I kept learning more about how to set up different effects, so while not featured in the above video, this update also adds reflective effects to the parts of the characters that are intended to be shiny or metallic, where previously only Kit had these effects.
Interestingly, I also figured out how to make "glowy" textures by making things reflect a solid color, rather than the environment, so not only do all characters get to have glowy eyes in their final outfits like Kit already does, but now Mads gets the glowsticks I desperately wanted her to have before!
Also in that picture, you can see she finally has real shoulders! Previously, to save time on bone weighting woes I just kept the arms as separate meshes from the torso, but as is often the case with things I keep putting off, it turned out to not actually be that scary!
In addition to giving everyone real shoulders, I also gave everyone real wrists by connecting their hands to their arms in the same way! (there are some exceptions, not every character has their arms out, so not every character benefits from connected wrists.
This also gave me an opportunity to fix Sunshine's toothpick arms, because in the original upload, her arms were crazy levels of skinny.
And I'd like to close this off with a slight rant, because I have discovered while working on these mods that the assets for this game are really just thrown together wildly. Like, the file names for the malkavian models are not consistent across outfits, but much weirder than that, the first person arms are split across two models for each character. The main model is used for things like handling weapons or lock picking, but there's a second model just for casting spells - and THAT model has a default pose that looks like the lock picking animation, but clearly isn't the one from in-game. Which is SO wild. Like - y'all know what T-Posing is, right? Even the default arms have something kinda like that, with the fingers splayed out in a wide pose, which would not only make it easier for artists to work on them, but would also make it easier to pose them for animating.
but the spellcasting hands have a default pose that looks like THIS. Weirdly curled fingers included. Whenever they were animating spells, they had to start with this, and I cannot imagine why.
Hey there. Just want to say, I see you link to my Formatter guide in the description of your mods. Appreciate it. <3
Yeah, Bloodlines assets are a mess like that. As it so happens, here's a video explaining some of why that is. That's Tim Cain, one of Troika Games' founders.
About the first-person hands: the clan-specific hands are actually a feature of the the Unofficial Patch Plus. In the original game, only Nosferatu have unique hands. The other six clans share a model, and the male hands are saved with that broken rest pose. Far as I can tell, looking at the models/textures, the female and Nosferatu hands were made by editing the male hands. There's actually only one skeleton.
The casting animations are also something in the data, but not used in the original game. There's only the one model, which is a copy of the messed up male hands. Pain to deal with that when modding the hands.
You've obviously already found a way to sort it out for the casting hands, but lemme share how I handled it. I copied the rest pose from the female skeleton to the male skeleton, and worked with that straightened out skeleton. When all the models were done, I attached the casting hands to the straightened out skeleton, then copied the broken pose back.
How is it nearly March? I've badly lost track of time.
You know, I had hoped this custom model's arms and legs would give me less trouble than her torso, but I was wrong. (At their core they're just tubes, right? Wrong). I wanted to finish her arm and hand before making another update. That's not quite done. I got stuck on every part of her arm. Her fingers and knuckles went pretty fast, but then I pretty much hit a wall connecting her knuckles to her wrist. Failing real bad at figuring out the lines that run along her palm and up her arm.
It's nearly done, I hope. Need to finish the last bit over the base of her thumb, then do another pass over her palm and forearm. With that, her whole arm/hand will be done, from her shoulder to her fingertips.
More talk about textures and a big development in VTMB modding under the cut.
I've also been working on her textures. Spent a large part of January on that. I made new face and body textures for her, combining parts from 3-4 characters. The above picture is a before/after of her head. The base is the female Hunter, which you can see I scaled up and made a lot paler. I copied some skin from the Lotus Blossom girl's neck. The lips and ears are Therese's, (fun fact - Jeanette's lipstick extends past the outer edge of her lips. I gather people do this on purpose to make their lips look thicker), and the eyebrows are Heather's. I did rotate the eyebrows a little.
The only thing left to do on her head texture is add some eyeshadow, which I'll do once the model is done. I need to actually UV map her onto her textures so I can paint straight onto the model. Her body texture isn't as far along. I want to extend some skin texturing on her torso, at her waist and shoulders, but I want to UV map her first to see where to extend that skin to. And I want to do that before I make her skin paler. (Most of the skin I'm using is from human characters). I also tested a bunch of things to see what does and does not work for editing clothing textures. Between cloth and skin, what works on one texture doesn't work on the other, sometimes.
Another thing that happened recently is that DDLullu showed up on the forums and posted a video of what looks like a custom model in VTMB with working facial animation. The Source engine stores data for facial animation in 32-bit signed floats. VTMB, however, stores that data in bytes, and we don't know how to decompile those bytes. DDLullu discovered that VTMB also supports using floats for at least the position data, so he's been working on his Formatter, updating it so it can get that data into Bloodlines.
He released an updated Formatter this past weekend, and I've started testing it. I'm seeing some issues that he can hopefully sort out, and then we'll have the ability to add custom models with facial animation. It's imperfect, to the point I'd discourage people from using it to update existing models, but being able to create new models for new NPCs in a mod is a huge step forward for the mod community.
I assume Psycho-A will add the updated Formatter into the SDK. Once that's done and I can see how it's set up, I'll update my Formatter guide. Don't think we'll need a separate guide. Setting up the model is the same, you just have a chunk of extra work to add the facial animation.
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