Gus character rig and animation tests
If you have been following me on here or on my social media profiles you may have picked up on the fact that I am a fan of the video game series Half-Life by Valve Corporation. In spite of some of the games’ age I was always enamoured with their impact on the gaming industry, the technology that brought these games to fruition, the strange and fabulous world Valve have so diligently crafted over the years, and the various fan communities that have blossomed in the wake their popularity. With new found skills in animation I have decied to make some fan content starring one character from the beloved series… Gus. The forklift driver who appears at the beginning of Half-Life. The fourth and last image is what Gus looked like originally in Half-Life 1.
This rig was created using Hisanimations, an animation Youtuber that specializes in creating character rigs for source engine characters, Blender 3d addon rigi-all. Essentially I was able to modify the existing rig from the model that was imported straight from the game Black Mesa: Blue Shift, a fan remake of the second expansion pack of the original Half-Life. I was able to do this using two programs: GFScape for extracting models and materials and Source IO for importing to Blender 3d. You can find more information about the addon and how to use it in the linked video below.
The characters appearance also uses some modified textures. While I was able to import head textures from the game files they didn’t match the look I envisioned for Gus. So ended up combining two of them into one. The final result was the more portly, middle-aged look that was inspired by the iteration seen in the fan-made animated web series Zero Viscosity by Bruva Alfabusa. Below is how Gus looks in the web series and the two face textures used to Gus’s with final result present as well as the last image.
I also recreate Gus’s eyes as the importing appeared to cause the existing eyes to malfunction (source engine eyes work in a weird way, they aren’t an actual sphere and are more like a texture… I think). Shortly after finalizing the rig I set about experimenting with it. Below are the work-in-progress animations I am making as well as a run cycle.
