Mildly Improved Weapon Textures
This addon (mildly) improves the textures of the Half-Life 2 weapons in Garry’s Mod, keeping performance and the original art style in mind while bringing out a greater level of detail. Not just a simple upscaling job, this uses a mix of Valve’s unused high resolution textures, upscaling and retexturing for the best possible results without going overboard as so many HD texture packs often do.
This is something of a successor to my old Enhanced Weapon World Models, which I removed due to constant reports of issues with the model replacements. This avoids any troublesome model replacements and focuses solely on textures for the view and world models.
You can find the Half-LIfe 2-compatible version HERE
As for the changes:
VIEW MODELS
– The Bugbait, Crowbar, Frag Grenade, Gravity Guns and 9mm Pistol have higher resolution textures that were unused in the retail game.
– RPG uses a higher resolution texture from the 2003 beta, along with a proper bump map and tweaked phong shading.
– The AR2 and SMG1 have been retextured using a mix of upscaling and their higher resolution textures from the 2003 beta. A proper bump map was added to the AR2, while the SMG1’s bump and phong maps were edited as they were based on a pre-release version of the texture.
– The .357 Magnum, Crossbow and Shotgun have been upscaled and retextured using parts from vertthrasher and Juniez. The .357 now has a bump map and phong shaders which it lacked before, while the Shotgun had its phong brightness reduced.
– SLAM was given a higher resolution retexture, and its old environment map shaders were replaced with phong shaders.
– Stunstick now uses phong shading and has illumination mapping applied to the electrode-looking orange thingies.
WORLD MODELS
– Edited 9mm Pistol texture to better match up with the view model, as the texture used in the final game was based on a pre-release version of the 9mm Pistol.
– AR2, Stunstick and .357 textures were edited to better match up with their view models. The AR2 and Stunstick were upscaled in resolution, while the .357 has tweaked shaders and transparency to remove the solid meshing in the trigger guard.
– The Stunstick has illumination mapping applied to the electrode-looking orange thingies.
– Annabelle has a higher resolution texture.
– The RPG and Shotgun were edited to match up their color schemes with their respective view models.
– Gravity Guns were given higher resolution textures based on the one used on HL2’s Super Gravity Gun, which was downscaled in Gmod for some reason.
– SMG1 uses a higher resolution texture and its reflectivity was toned down.
– Frag Grenade was retextured as it was based on a pre-release version of the view model. There’s also a fix for where the Grenade world model would show as fully bright even in darkness.
NOTES/ISSUES:
– As this only changes textures, this addon should be compatible with any addons that change the animations or sounds of the weapons, though addons that affect the textures and/or models of these weapons will not be compatible with this.
– If you play with your textures set below High, you won’t see much of a benefit from this addon as the game downscales texture resolution for performance. Any performance impacts should be minor on all but the weakest rigs, as this keeps view model textures to a modest 1024×1024 resolution rather than being an excessive 4K upscale.
– Fun fact: The .357 world model is the same model used in HL1 but with a stock photo of a Colt Anaconda as a texture. Another weird thing is that the Gmod version of the model was given phong shaders and a turbosmoothed mesh for no obvious reason. A joke by a Facepunch dev maybe?
CREDITS:
Base Textures: Valve
Other Texture Sources: Juniez, vertthrasher, GSPOLY3D
