Initially I was making them for a Source Filmmaker thing that I'm working on, but I decided to throw them on the TF2 Workshop and see what happens:

The Martian Marshal (needs more screenshots, I know)

The Handsome Homburg

I think you'd have to define different materials to different parts of the model so you can have a VMT1 and VMT2, with one of them paintable and one transparent.

Where are the skeletons for the already decompiled models? If I import the Spy .mdl, for example, I get the model, but not the rig. I tried importing the DMX files, but that got nothing.

[edit]nm, the DMX does work. I guess it has to be the first thing that's opened. Though I get a C runtime error when I import the DMX.

I'm pretty sure these are defined by the VMT, which is what the materials menu in the importer makes.

So, for example, if you want glowing bits on your item, you click the 'Self Illumination' checkbox, and then add a Shared Illum Mask. That then uses the alpha channel of whatever texture you loaded for the Illum Mask to determine what parts of the item glow, so full white is glowing and black is not (I believe. I haven't done this myself yet). The colour of the glow is determined by the RGB values you enter in the menu.

Transparency I am less sure of. I think that just goes by the alpha of your primary texture, but you have to make sure you're NOT using Base Map Alpha Phong Mask or Base Alpha for the Cube Map Alpha Mask, because those make the Alpha channel determine Phong and/or Reflection instead of the visibility of the texture itself.

That was it. Weird that it's independent of the mesh when in edit mode. Thanks again.

I hit some key combination by accident and created this weird box that looks like a bounding box, but isn't, and I can't figure out how to get rid of it.

A screenshot is here: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7382/10659944165_6ec30aa9ce_o.jpg

It seems to be actually part of my mesh, because if I start a new blender project and append this object into it, the weird box comes with it. I can't find any child objects in the scene tree. If I try to select just the hat in edit mode and separate it, I'll get the box too. If I move the hat outside of the box and try to separate it, I'll get a copy of the box, but not of the hat. I'm worried this is going to mess things up for me when it comes time to align the hat with a character.

Ah! That worked (though model viewer still errors on it, but that doesn't matter). Cheers!

How? I've made a badge, compiled it with the TF2 importer, and it works fine in TF2, previews perfectly in-game and loads in TF2 Modelviewer with no problems. I take all the necessary files and put them in usermod in SFM in the correct folder structure (I'm pretty sure: .mdl, .vtx, and .vvd in usermod\models\[itemname], .vmt and .vtfs in usermod\materials\models\[itemname]), and it doesn't work in SFM. If I try to load the item in SFM itself, it's invisible, except for the bone, if I try to load it with the hlmv.exe in SFM's \bin folder, I get 'error loading model.'

Is there a step I'm missing somewhere?

The badge is more for an SFM thing I'm working on. I figure using the TF2 importer to compile the .mdl for me would be easier and more likely to work correctly with SFM than trying to compile it manually. I guess making a hi-poly version of the badge and then baking out the AO and Normal map via Selected to Active is the only way to go to get the results I want.

I can't figure this out. The Valve DOTA2 Texture guide (this is a TF2/general Blender question, bear with me, here) starts out with them saying to bake an AO Map to capture part of the sculptural detail of the normal maps, and the example image they show is apparently an AO Map showing shadowing generated by a normal map (or they have a billion poly bear model that they're baking their normal/ao/light maps out of. Which I guess is possible.)

So I'm trying to create a badge that has some raised text on it (see, TF2), and that'll blow through the poly limit if I try to model the text directly. I can create a normal map for it easily enough in GIMP, but I want some of the detail from the normal map to be reflected in the AO map, because it seems like it should be.

So I apply the normal map and it shows up properly, and then I bake AO, and the AO bakes out flat. I've tried setting the material to effect geometry and ambient, I've tried setting AO to raytrace instead of approximate, no matter what I do, the normal map gets ignored in the AO bake.

Am I missing something? Am I going to have to make a super-high poly version of the badge and bake normals and AO out of it, instead?