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So a Valve employee probably picked the wrong texture in devlopment and no one got around to fixing it. Everyone's just been decorating the maps with clusters 1 and 2. They probably place down 3 once and go "Oh this prop's textures are fucked" and delete it
If you make a change on a prop that is already shipped, you run the risk of changing the looks of other maps, it's a side effect that is usually undesired. Of course here it was broken and very likely was not used anyway, but as it may be a general process, it's easier to just use another prop or create new ones than bother with this. This sort of things happen frequently in gamedev, as long as it's not too messy it's fine ^^
i was originally thinking this too, but the uvs aren't finished at a closer look. they're all just flat side projections unconnected. it's possible there were plans to use a single texture atlas for the box and hand truck during dev, but then the boxes were left unused and never properly textured. it is possible this is leftover from a very early (very poor) uv pass for the box and handtruck together, just default uvs using planar mapping of face sets
@@dan_loeb normally i would say this is a reasonable assumption, but this is a very simple basic set of boxes. the textures were probably completely painted on in whatever modelling software valve used, a process that usually results in perfectly fine UVs (but normally not done unless its for something very simple like this). i think these UVs are supposed to be this way. i think its more possible there might be a missing texture that was named similarly to the handcart and its either erroneously pointing to the handcart texture because its so similar and autofill pointed to it or is straight-up a misspelling that accidentally pointed to a legitimate texture as this is a very common error to make, so it never showed up as a missing texture in compilation or during playtesting
Please don't abandon your clean and to-the-point editing style to stimulate the viewer! I consider your channel one of the better ones in all of gamedev youtube even!
it just makes me think that there was another handtruck model that had boxes on it due to how the boxes are stacked in a way for a handtruck...but the two was seperated and while they updated the handtruck they forgot to update the boxes.
as a 3d environment artist, I think that those UVs that box cluster 03 has look an awful lot like the result an automatic UV unwrap and/or automatic UV layout. The UVs at the top and bottom of the row at a slight angle, and the thin, spindly ones on either end are very indicative of a common way of automatically creating UVs for a prop, where a cube is projected around the object and UVs are defined based on those 6 sides, which is a common way to get those thin, 1 polygon wide UVs, If this wasn’t the case, it may have been an automatic layout or a combination of both. Cause think about it, why would you want thin uvs that barely take up any pixels with such a big footprint and their own texture in the atlas? or need to manually line them up with the edges they share on the boxes? you’d just attach them to the larger squares and it’d fix your problem. The other indicator is those diagonal UVs, why would you want some UVs on your atlas to be slightly tilted to one side? they’d just take up more room than if their edges were parallel to the x and y. Those are the things that immediately jump out to me that show the prop doesn’t have a corrupt or misplaced texture file, as you say, as I’ve spent probably hundreds of hours laying out UVs for props exactly like this. Issues like these are great signs and things to look for to identify a prop that somebody forgot to finish texturing! I assume that at some point in the process, the creator of box_cluster03 got distracted, left work, or some other mysterious thing happened and they forgot to finish laying out their UVs, likely on the same atlas as the other box clusters! This a very cool thing to find! It’s direct evidence of some story of an artist who didn’t finish their work, and it only became visible almost two decades after they finished working on it because ONE person put it in a map, and you made a video on it! I wonder what the reason it never got finished is. Congrats on doing some work for a Valve employee or some 3D artist somewhere that has been overdue for over 15 years! And thanks for sharing the video, this is clearly my jam, I’m a big fan of your breakdowns of stuff like this, it’s super cool to see all the details brought to light! Hope this was interesting to you as well.
In 3D modeling, there are tools that set up UVs in certain ways, which the artist can then change later to finish the prop, the box UVs look like they were set up that way, and then not touched, meaning the box UVs look unfinished rather than there being a corrupted texture file. Hope that helps :)
I also realized how there probably isn't/never was a dedicated texture file for it while creating the video, but I left the part of me searching for a texture file in because it represented what I was thinking at the time. It really is fascinating, though. Maybe the creator just forgot to stack the UV's with the other two clusters and never looked back. We will probably never know!
My guess is that box cluster was originally meant to be a part of the hand truck prop, probably sitting on it, which is why the boxes are stacked like that. So in a beta version they had the textures for both the boxes and the hand truck in the same atlas, but last moment they decides the hand truck is going to be on its own, so they split the models up and changed the atlas without updating that one file.
You appear to be correct box_cluster_03 has a joint labelled as box_cluster_handtruck.polymsh_detached. Also hand_truck01.tga and psd are mysteriously missing from the repository.
as someone who was mapping for tf2 as far back as late 2008, i can tell you that this model always had a scuffed texture, at least as far back as when i started. i think everyone in the mapping community knew this, but it wasn't anything anyone ever mentioned as it wasn't the only thing valve broke in TF2 (func_rotating i'm looking at you!). people would usually just work around valve's "decisions" and hope that they didn't change things later on that would break things further (check out the shooting range in pl_moonlit to see an example of that, when they decided to one day refactor the folder structure for a load of props, making all the models for pistols become big ERROR signs instead)
Holy shit someone at Valve must have seen this video, or someone who saw this video posted a bug about it and they finally fixed it. I saw the changelog for today and IMMEDIATELY thought of this video.
I just looked into something, apparently there were a couple changes made to junction in the march 5th 2009 patch, fixing a engi teleporter glitch and also fixing some bad overlay assignments, among other minor issues, perhaps this is where box cluster 03’s textures got messed up
i just watched an 8 minute long video essay about a single missing texture for a barely noticeable prop in a 17 year old game. this is, truly, what no updates does to a community
Is it possible the typo / mistake wasn't with the box texture itself, but rather with Junction's choice to include that set of boxes? I would guess the mapper intended to include set 1 or 2, but accidentally included 3 instead - and since it's a small room people don't pay much attention to, it never got noticed.
Oh man this video just popped up for me, box_cluster03 has been a meme in TF2C for a good year ingame as one of the few "hey you wanna see something funny" things in Junction, up there with the clipping doors at B and props without hitboxes in spawn. Also that entire room as well since everyone forgets it exists.
I wonder if the corruption was due to changing the model for "hand_truck01"? Maybe it was originally modelled with boxes on it, but Valve later split the boxes off into box_cluster03 to allow for more variety in level props, and when a later update rebuilt some of the textures, the texture file used by both objects was re-generated from the now-empty hand_truck01 model, and nobody at Valve noticed.
Huh. Maybe it's possible to look through the game files of the Xbox 360 version of TF2 and see if the prop works correctly there. It's closer to the original release build of the game than what's available in that archive.
have worked and studied for videogame art work in general. that just looks like someone at valve was lazy and just used a automated UVs function to get the coordinates and chose a random ass file to. those problems cant be "corrupted" because they have a name and coordinates for a reason.
Counterpoint If box_cluster_3 was normal it wouldn't have a dedicated fan base and a video from a big RU-vidr. Never change box_cluster_3 you are perfect just the way you are
Maybe the reason this box wasn't used anywhere else was because it was scrapped at some point so they removed the textures, then when Sean was making this map he just found this box cluster 3 along some prop files so he just dropped it in. He either was using some mode of the camera when making the map that had the textures removed to make it easier to navigate (I'm not sure that is even an option) or he was just so tired of adding these little details that he didn't notice that it had messed up textures or didn't bother to check having thought that it would look normal in game
could there not be a chance that box cluster 03 was originally part of the hand truck's model, but was later made separate? the fact that it calls the textures for the hand truck probably means it was originally intended to just be part of that model
sean definitely knew the texture was fucked up when he put it there, thinkin "someone's gonna get real annoyed trying to figure this out in a few months" and now its been 15 years
The UVs for the box looks like a very quick and dirty algorithmic smart unwrap. I figure this is just an unfinished prop that slipped through the cracks
I honestly think I saw that ugly texture, but probably thought "Valve will fix that", and moved on. And given Junction isn't really a popular map, I most likely just forgot it existed. Edit, as of the 24th of October, this texture is now history! (and they also fixed Scout's blu pants!)
you could use a correlation filter on the edges of the faces for the atlas (basically render all the little boxes in 3:05) against all the atlases in the game prior, try rotating it four times since plain correlation doesn't take into account rotation (look into Fourier-Mellin transform). if the texture for box 3 is still in the game, it will probably have a very high correlation value with the atlas mapping.
This is kind of a lesson that not every detail matters, since even if there is a small mistake, many people will never notice it. It's usually only the big picture/general idea people look at
Tbh i think it would be cool if you did a lil retexturing to it for the s2 port, make it looks like toasters or something as an ode to the messed up textures
I noticed it, but I thought it was a problem only in my client (sometimes a texture or two get fucked up in my game for some reason), not on everyone else's
Theory: The handtruck probably had a different texture file in development, and was split into a two prop atlas, but at some point the handtruck's file was completely overtaken by the handtruck and the box was forgotten about
I know this may seem anticlimactic but if my memory serves me right, this box cluster 03 has always been this way. Ever since the map launched to be official, it was screwed up since day one. So my best guess is that when the map was picked it was Normal but during transportation, someone at Valve messed up.
