okay, so I built my newest map up to a point where you trade off a standard portal gun to a portal+gravity gun. my issue here is I want to make something that resembles a mixture of the two guns. Obviously this means breaking out some modeling program i never heard of and getting another migraine from pure frustration and confusion like I did when i found hammer. So I just wanna ask for some quick links to what i need, some tutorials, and some hints. Try and make this as painless as possible.

please and thankyou

In my opinion, milkshape is the best way to go. Again, just my opinion. It has a very similar interface to hammer, and was made to support half life smd files. The only thing is that it is only free for 30 days, but I've found that many people are hint willing to share their account with you over the Internet. The developers haven't seemed to do anything about that, or care.

teach me the ways of the force, CB!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Eyf1eSuJ0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_gF8HmVTW0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0pfwpoqv7Y

http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/tutorials.html

http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/hel ... Guide.html

awesome, thank you. Now who do you think I can talk to for ahem accounts?

EDIT: the halflife tutorial 404'd on me

Check your PM's

first off, thanks for the 'thing'

second, my standard portal gun is doing this thing where the two portals do not connect to each other. Its up on a pedastal where you find it and it is part of an automated test just like when you originally acquire it in portal 1, but the portals it fires are not connecting like when you hold it yourself. is there a fix to this? Do I have to resort to prop_portals?

EDIT: turns out i do have to use prop_portals and portal_detectors, and they work

okay so the first problem i noticed with attached models and such is that when you walk up to a wall or a portal, the whole gun decided to phase through walls. Also the glitchy nature of the measurement entity makes it jerk so much that the steam community wont shut up about it.

So new idea is to be able to swap the portalgun to atlas and pbody skins for the differant modes. Dr. Orange said it is possible, but I only half-understood what he said needed to be done

Change the skin of the viewmodel entity.

okay I managed to get that working, but now i got the problem if the command r_drawviewmodel 1 not functioning when I strip the player of the gun. Is there a way to lock the gun's buttons by trigger?