Some of you on IRC may or may not have heard about me having a sekrit project, that sekrit project is an aprilon hat, made specifically for our server with out name on it etc, i've spent 2 days on this so far and its turned out to be a real challenge given i have the modelling skills of a dead rat covered in chocolate served on a plate of rusted nails

Below you'll find my current WIP image.

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Ignore the colours on it those are just placeholders so i can actually export it as something the model viewer can actually read, its worth noting that it will say APRILON over the front when its done, so far it just has the A modelled as i was testing the most important vital part of the hat, jigglebones, yes that A is sitting on top of a carefully scupted jigglestick (tm) and bounces around a little depending on movement so if you jump up and down the letter will bounce about with you, i've looked at the bounce in the model viewer and its quite good i must say

However i've come across a few slight issues and those are that firstly the texture doesn't seem to show in the model viewer, i get the dodgy source missing texture texture of the pink and black squares, secondly for some reason if i move the model out of the location its intially saved it refuses to load properly >.<

I'm hoping that as we have some able GModders here they might know more about that portion than me, i will continue tomorrow to model the rest of the letters and set those up with their own jigglesticks (tm) so that i can give a full image of it, if anyone has any clues about the issues i have then do feel free to post here and let me know WTF i'm doing wrong >.<

Constructive comments also appreciated

Fucking want! How bout a fedora style hat? I fucking love fedoras <3, i will give you my babies if you do that

hehe sticking them on an existing hat is easy i just want to avoid copying any TF2 hats less we face the wrath of valve who have expressed their desire not to use valve models with the hat mod

Only issue really is keeping the poly count low, TBH this one might need redoing as the count is a little on the high side, its sitting at around 2.6k at present and i know from reading that there is a hardcoded limit for any model of 10k and i want to avoid causing any unwanted lag, potentially we could end up with 32 of these bouncing around on the server so lag is a big issue here, granted we rarely see 32 donators on at once but hopefully something like this might encourage more donations as i know Karl has expressed a desire to have a AD only hat

Now make a camera beard with "ManIAc" dangling from it! I command ye!

Really awesome hat, Cyph! Looking great so far! Can't wait to see a bit more finished project!

Funny you should ask

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I must point out i had a little help from Multilogic who knew a few things i didn't so not all my own work, currently loads in TF2 and the letters bounce as intended, so far i only have a demo version but realistically the other classes could all be done relatively easily

After a much un-needed break i got around to finishing these hats and am proud to present the Aprilon Hat



Its pretty much the same as the image above with the exception that i've toned down the colours a lot so it won't be as bright and in your face, i've created a separate hat for each class so that it actually fits the model without showing parts of their head sticking through.

The finished files can be downloaded here

However and this is an important note

Installing the models locally won't make them show up because it will require Karl to add them to the equipment manager because they aren't made to replace any models, what it will enable you to do is avoid downloading them when the time comes

Thanks for the awesome compliments and replies *hint hint*

Also thanks to Karl for fixing equipment manager *hint hint*

It's live?! O__O

Can't wait to see it ingame!

If I should give any constructive criticism, it would probably be that since the whole top is red, it looks a bit 2D-ish. Shading or some bump-mapping (or whatever it's called), on the red part, would be awesome.

No it's not live, EM won't be back until we switch servers

Ah, okay. Too bad!

If i knew how i would but i don't

The model itself is already a fairly extreme case of high polycount so can't add anything there sadly, the texture files are just a few VTF's, so if anyone can do better please do before we move servers and karl fixes the EM

You seem to be misunderstanding here. I MAKE demands, I don't fulfill them. ;P
Anyhow, it's still a freaking awesome hat!

I had a proper tutorial for bumpmaps but they are huge, they gotta be .bmp -> .vtf and they are big cca. 5mb, too big