Overview
Hi there, I’m Crack. You may not know me, but I’ve lurked gamebanana for a long time, and I think I’ve figured out how to be succesfull with your submissions due to popularity and frequency of certain trends and items. I’ll be briefly covering all the different things you should consider if you are going to submit a custom model, skin, whatever you want to call it onto gamebanana.
Choosing a Replacement
This is possibly the easiest step. If you’re going to be replacing a weapon model, you’re probably going to want to consider the behavior of the weapon. Between caliber of the cartridge, magazine size, weapon type, and size, you’ll really want to find an original replacement that will fit the same role, but add a little bit of spice to the game all your own.
Well, you’d be outright /WRONG/.
The best replacement for a weapon is a high definition or “modernized” version of the weapon that already exists. People already made new original weapons back in 2007 as replacement models, don’t try to follow their lead. Instead make an AUG A3 instead of the Aug A1. Or a NEW ak-47 with even MORE polygons and even HIGHER RES textures. And by god, don’t stop there. You’ll need a kobra sight and a silencer to go with that! And that brings me to my next section…
Choosing Attachments.
No, it’s not optional. You /need/ attachments. See this day and age the beauty of a good weapon should be overshadowed by how many awkward metal boxes and tubes are strapped to it. That’s why we dare deviate from the weapons that are already in the game, they may not have enough mountrails. Always add silencers to guns that don’t have them ingame, and remove the muzzleflash attachment and refuse to release unsilenced versions. Always attach red dot sights of any variety, and also don’t remove the rear ironsights aswell. This is how true men use their weapons, so you should follow their example. And by god, whatever you do, make sure the env and bumpmaps are slightly more or less detailed than the main weapon model to emphasize the attachments’ importance. I’ll cover that more in the next section.
Textures
Ah, textures. Possibly the most important part of a model. Making your textures allows you to create a beautiful weapon that fits within the style of the game really well, adds a personal touch and shows off your artistic skills.
I just want to be clear that you shouldn’t do ANY of that. Photorealism is your ONLY choice. If you’d notice, most games you’ll be modding(Let’s be honest, mostly Counter-Strike) are a little bit aged and have moderate resolution for their environments and player models, and have skewed a bit from photorealistic aesthetics for the purpose of having a very defined style. Obviously photorealism when it comes to your replacement weapon is the only compliment for this. Your textures must be 100,000 pixels by 100,000 pixels MINIMUM, and be broken into as many parts as possible. (I’m talking at least 15 VTF/VMT files for the gun alone.) Be sure to add as many capital letters and symbols to your directories and filenames as possible. If I cannot see oil residue from the player’s finger on the bolt of your gun, I am NOT going to even bother using it. The details that don’t even show up ingame are the most important part, I want to be dedicating at least 500mb to your replacement, so you better not ever try to compress your textures or I and all other bananites will be severely disappointed. These textures better have bump and env maps that compliment a lighting engine not even present in the game you’re putting the model into, and by god don’t use the same values on your attachments, they need to look as if they’re in a different plane of existence being lit by some second unforseen light source. This will also ensure the weapon doesn’t work in maps that use fullbright and will glow brightly and obnoxiously.
Models
I already covered this initially, you will be making a remodel of the gun you’re replacing already is, but put more detail into it. If you want to beat the competition, try modeling the internals if you feel others have already got you beat when it comes details to the frame. What you see is not important when it comes to preparing visuals, rather filesize and unseeable detail. (Higher filesize, more unseeable detail ingame, better skin.)
But let’s say you’re DUMB enough to want to use a gun that isn’t what the gun already is. (Please don’t be this dumb, though.) Don’t waste your time modeling one, Go back a few years worth of skins, and TAKE one someone ALREADY made, and just put it on a new animation set you didn’t even make!(Maybe even add some of those attachments they probably didn’t add to it.) make some fancy renders, and there you go! Perfect new submission, guaranteed 10/10.
After your submission, you’ll probably be messaged a billion times to make a world model, and you will reluctantly do so, since they won’t stop whining about you releasing an unfinished project as finished.(How dare they!) Now, when making your world model, there’s some things you need to keep in mind. You don’t make one. At all. You just port your view model(With all of the unseeable detail still present) to be used as a world model and resize it. HOWEVER, be careful, when resizing it be sure to make it slightly too big or too small, never proportion it correctly in comparison to the rest of the game’s armaments you have freely available for reference. And make sure you have your world model reference an ENTIRELY NEW set of textures that are just copy+pasted versions of your view model textures in a new directory. This way you’ll make them dedicate 1gb to your textures instead of an insignificant 500mb, thus making your skin better. If you feel like that’s too much detail for such a smaller, less seen model, you can take a couple pixels off of the resolution.(You damn monster.)
Animations
This is where you’ll put all your heart into. Do stunning, beautiful animations for your weapon. Make your character do a realistic, but original reload that shows familiarity with the weapon you’re replacing, and go ahead and make it a little bit flashy. It’s a video game, make it fun. There are two VERY important rules though. The first rule is that make sure the reload animation is much longer than the actual ingame reload time so you cannot use the skin online. You always want your replacement skins for online shooting games to be unusable online.
The second rule is to always include sound scripts! But I’ll cover this more under sounds.
Keep this in mind and you’ll be sure to have created a wonderful animation set that people will steal and use on their guns for the next 3 to 5 years of submissions.
Sounds
Replacement sounds are always a must, and making some new sounds to fit your new weapon would never hurt. However, make sure your new sounds are raw recordings from ranges, with almost NO mixing put into it whatsoever, so it sounds extremely out of place when used ingame. When you use these, please keep in mind that when you replace your weapon, that means its whole sound set is at your disposal to replace and call at different points in the animation. Make sure you do NOT do this.
We’re going to use sound scripts! What are those you may ask? I’m not familiar on the technical parts, but sound scripts are something you can use so you can hear your character’s breathing and thumb brush against the gun while you’re reloading, while also making the replacement incompatible with default sounds and difficult to use with other skins that use them. Therefore near all skins should use them. This is not debatable and you must make sure this is done.
Ported content; Do’s and Don’ts
Ported content is a way for you to spend large amounts of time to bring weapons from games with completely clashing art styles into a different game. Always port from low budget games with awful weapon design, or completely different topics than the game you’re porting it into.(I want to see Gandalf shooting a Star Trek Phaser in Day of Defeat, people.)
The reason you won’t be tasteful in your selection of ported content is because if you are it will be deleted. Promptly. You see, many bananites have slaved hours combining models they didn’t make with animations they didn’t make, so when they see you porting models nobody on the site made that look really good and may possibly be used, they get upset about how disrespectful you’re being towards the original creator.(Which you are being, you piece of s**t.) Think about how hard Infinity Ward worked on that scope model you used on your skin, and now you’re releasing it on a not very well known site to be used in a completely unrelated game with different gameplay mechanics. I bet they’d be bankrupt in a month thanks to you if we didn’t have such loyal members reporting it.
In closing…
that about sums it up, if you took everything I said into consideration you should have yourself a 10/10 submission.
Seeya next time for my report on how there aren’t enough rainbow knife skins or golden desert eagles!