User:Reahan/HLMVHelp

The Half-Life Model Viewer Help Page Rewrite Personal Project (mouthful of a title totally intended) by Ragnar Homsar

The purpose of this page is to make the Model Viewer Help page much more informative, detailed, and easy to read. At the moment, it works for the basics of HLMV, but it's a stub and the lack of pictures makes the thing a tad harder to understand. I'm using this page as a sandbox since a) this will take a good chunk of time to be passable enough to be public and b) I'd like to be able to use the various functions of MediaWiki such as tables and section dividers. Maybe I'll also incorporate a general image editing section for HLMV renders, who knows.

Please don't edit this! If you have a suggestion I'd be more than willing to listen to it on my Talk Page or the IRC channel!

Page Opening

The Half-Life Model Viewer (commonly shortened to "HLMV" or "Model Viewer") is a tool included with the Source SDK that's designed to view and manipulate Source Engine model files. On the Team Fortress Wiki, Model Viewer is used to make images of the various Classes in TF2, hats, Classes wearing hats, painted hats, props, etc.

• TODO: Image of the default Model Viewer UI, Link to the VDC article on HLMV

Setting Up Model Viewer

Installing the Source SDK

Firstly, to use Model Viewer, you first need to download and install the Source SDK via Steam. To do this, open Steam, go to the Games section, and near the top left of the Steam window, click on the drop-down list and select Tools. From there, right-click on "Source SDK" (not Source SDK Base 2006 or Source SDK Base 2007), and click Install. Let the Source SDK download and install, then run it from Steam. On first run, the Source SDK will copy necessary files to its directory. When it finishes, close the Source SDK.

• TODO: Various images for the Steam Window instructions, shot of the SDK doing its first-run tasks

Model Viewer Quality

Now that the Source SDK and Model Viewer are installed, we need to edit some of Model Viewer's settings to make it look its absolute best, since, by default, Model Viewer's rendering settings aren't spectacular. Model Viewer has no UI for graphical settings, so we need to do it by hand.

dxsupport.cfg

The best way of making Model Viewer look better is by editing some settings in the dxsupport.cfg file. dxsupport.cfg is located at, with the default Steam installation path:

C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\<your Steam login name goes here>\sourcesdk\bin\orangebox\bin

1) Once you've opened dxsupport.cfg's directory, open it with your preferred text editor.

2) Once the file is opened, do a search for any specified "DeviceID" with your graphics processing unit's name.

2a) Most GPUs manufactured after 2007 probably aren't listed here. If that's the case for your GPU, do a search for either "NVidia Unknown" or "ATI Unknown", depending on your card's manufacturer.

3) Once you've found the section for your GPU, add the following lines to it:

"DxLevel"	"99"
"ConVar.mat_antialias"	"8"
"ConVar.mat_forceaniso"	"8"
"ConVar.mat_picmip"	"-10"