[Tutorial] The complete guide to decompiling and recompiling models!

[TheKieranator]

Double post, but I need help before AF3/4 is due!

My GUIStudioMDL keeps crashing when I click compile after loading a QC. It's not just this QC either, but any other I load up. What do I do?

EDIT: The problem was solved by the helpful people in chat. Somehow I forgot that you need the SDK open.

[Barracuda]

Sigh... the situation with MDLDecompiler is pretty much the same as with VMEX... it's outdated, full of bugs but still the only usable tool of its kind. And, of course: it's closed-source so you can't just go ahead and make it better.

[kitare102]

Things have worked perfectly until I tried to use GUIStudioMDL. Whenever I try to give it the right path, it just says the either studiomdl.(what ever the end is) or gameconfig.txt is not there.

[Stickynote]

Ok here's the issue. I have gone through every help forum that I can find, but none of the fixes work.
I don't have the orangebox package, all I have is TF2.
This is probably a issue you have seen before, when I try to compile my files I get this error.

SteamStartup() failed: SteamStartup(0xf,0x0018F170) failed with error 1: failed to take master pipe connection lock

When I did a few fixes it came up with this...

SteamStartup() failed: SteamStartup(0xf,0x0018F170) failed with error 1: Failed create pipe: 6, Win32 Error 6 "The handle is invalid."

Then back to the first one...

I'm really losing my little 13 year old head about now and I just really need some help, OR if there is anything that does it automatically, because if I see one more error, I think i'm going to smash my computer against the wall.

[YM]

Pipelock is some crap steam does every now and then, you need to restart steam to get rid of it. As soon as it comes back, close all steam programs and restart steam.

We all suffer it, it's crap but at least it only takes a quick restart to fix

I have never had that error when working with models, but with Hammer, restarting Steam fixes it

[Stickynote]

Wow, that really worked didn't it? Jeez I go over a million tutorials about the net and nothing gives the simple RESTART STEAM! Lol, shows what they know.

Dunno what you googled, but if you google the error alone I'm sure you'd see people saying "restart steam".

[ZooL]

does it work for V_Models too ?? because i want to invert 2 models which have the same anims ...

[EArkham]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZooL

does it work for V_Models too ?? because i want to invert 2 models which have the same anims ...

You won't be able to flip a model with animations because the weightmap won't flip when you flip the mesh. You'd end up with something that looks like it's from The Thing.

You'd have to do more work in your modeling program and probably have to reassign/repaint the entire weightmap. You might get lucky and be able to use whatever mirror weightmap option your program has.

Also, bit of warning, but if you're using XSI Mod Tool, that will NEVER import smd weightmaps that assign more than one bone properly (due to an incorrect ordering sequence in the importer) but Max will. Dunno about Blender. Factor in that sometimes the decompiler will mess up animations and you're better off doing anything animated from scratch in your modeling program.