BEGINNER TO RESKINNING HALF-LIFE 1 MODELS? Created 7 months ago2024-04-19 13:27:51 UTC by jacksonmoorests

Hey Half-Life community! Just wanna say sorry for my spelling i know how to spell but im in a hurry. Ok so 25 years ago or whatever I first played halflife (i was like 14) and it changed my life. The modding was off the hook. Mods everywhere. The good ol days. Anyways, since getting a laptop last year recently I thought, you know what? They STILL dont make em like they used to! So I went back to halflife 1 and this time I got a cable to project it onto my TV, a xbox pad that works, a million mods out there. Its great! BUT...it got me thinking...I was 14 and I learned how to use worldcraft (very very basically) but enough to make a map! That was crazy. Now I wouldnt have a CLUE where to start. But then again, Im thinking its been 25 years and I came back. And people STILL play Sven and other mods now just like me. To start creating a mod at this point would be extremely late to the party...so late all that half the guests died of old age. BUT I want to do it. Not just for them... but for me. For the 14 year old nerd in me.

I therefore have a VERY long and hard road ahead of me. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. I am a freelance screenwriter in spare time so I have some very good ideas I would like to implement. However right now I am starting from scratch pretty much so I figured a good place to start would be learning to reskin existing models. Sounds simple right? SO rather than using MS Paint, is there a free program anyone recommends? Ive noticed the only way the HLMV accepts the file is if I save as 256 BMP...and then for some reason it loses quality and has this shiny look. I have googled and googled and cant find a reason for this. BMP is by definition a lossless file right? So how is it losing quality?

Anyway for anyone else interested in this at the same bottom level as me lol then let me know.

1. WHY IS BMP LOSING QUALITY WHEN SAVED AS 256? (No other ones seem to work I dont think)
2. ANYONE KNOW OF A FREE ART PROGRAM THAT WORKS GREAT WITH HL SKINNING AND ALLOWS EXPORT AS 256 BMP? (Converting seems to stop HLMV accepting import of it)
3. WHO WANTS TO TEAM UP WITH THIS GUUUUUY? ....Anyone? No?

I mean if anyone has any simple but monotonous modding tasks they need help with I am very happy to help out cos I need the practice and well its half life so Id chop my balls off to be a part of that lol

Hi and welcome to TWHL! It's nice to see someone with passion for learning to mod HL 🙂

Textures, whether for models or for maps, are very similar in requirements and how they're made. You can follow The303's map texture guide here.
For the image editor I can recommend Gimp. Alternatively there's also Paint.net, and for the final conversion to 8BPP BMP (AKA 256 colours indexed BMP) I recommend IrfanView as it does a really great job at preserving the colour quality. All three are free.

As for why the image loses quality when converting to 8BPP it's simply because you're reducing the amount of colour values that exists in the image, typically from 16,777,216 different colour values (24bit RGB) to only 256 colours!

For model viewers, these days it's recommended to use HLAM as it's far more up-to-date and have a lot of nice features.