#Specifically hl1 model

[komodocomics]

This is why I don't often show people my drawings in public

This should be a wholesome ship

[bubbytheliverstealingskeleton]

Hey

Hey

Hey y’all

[callmegaith]

is joshua ur character that was inspired by barneys hl1 design? u draw them with the same cute droopy eyes

Hl1 Barney is one inspo but Joshua is created based on a pretty specific type of character design that I like that includes "character that wears a hat, with sleepy eyes, and a tendency to annoy the protagonist" so he's more inspired by Benrey than Barney personality wise, but design wise, yeah the hl1 model

I made a "character inspiration" meme thing for him some while ago

The only characters that don't fit here design wise are Lila and William. They're there more cuz of the "parasite taking over host body" rather than design.

(should be noted tho that I draw most the characters with the same type of eyes XD I like the sleepy relaxed eyes)

[no0t2]

my friend @barneyfan99579 is cosplaying barney calhoun so i made him a remastered version of barney's ID from hl1 (specifically the HD model) to print out!

if you wish to use it for your own cosplay, feel free! just make sure to credit me (either by writing down my tag behind the ID or just noting it down in pictures!)

this is inspired off of some other interpretations i've seen of the ID but it's mostly a mashup of custom and canon!

[damp-pit-of-worms]

the g-man from half life (specifically the hl1 model) for FOREVER. because he sent gordon and adrian to stasis and they did not deserve that :(

The G-Man from Half Life is sentenced to The Damp Pit of Worms for forever on account of undeservedly sending Gordon and Adrian to stasis.

[gmanwhore]

Alright. The post. Reasons I think Dr. Coomer will replace Dr. Wallace Breen in HLVRAI2.

First off, they have the same HL1 model. We can infer the one scientist is Breen since he is the only person shown talking directly to G-man, and we know G-man have Breen the Xen crystal. So there is that connection.

Breen and Coomer are both there specifically to fit roles. On a meta level, Breen retconned in to be Black Mesa's Administrator. He only exists to fill a very specific role, and outside of that is completely unimportant. Coomer exists to be a tutorial NPC, nothing more.

Breen is a figurehead for humanity's oppressors (If you come on this post saying he is a Hitler allegory I will actually fucking kill you he role is so different. He is corrupted by propaganda he is not a leader by any stretch of the imagination.) Anyways. He is a spokesperson of the Combine as well. This could tie in to Coomer being the only one to know what controls them, that hey are just part of a game.

Also, I know Breengrub isn't canon BUT on the Twitter account you could see Breengrub's descent into pure puppetry as he just spouts things, hoping to lure out the Resistance. You know who is also stuck spouting out lines made for him? Coomer. Look man he is perfect at doing being the exposition guy, which is Breen's role in a sense.

Come on. Antagonist Coomer would go so fucking hard you know that. Can you imagine Gordon getting off the train and he just hears "Hello, Gordon!" Like imagine having to fight the friend who waited for you. That would go so fucking hard

[beebfreeb]

what are your inspirations?

Well depending on what exactly you mean, this answer gets really long.

Many of the video games and shows of my Very Young Life, one specific older family member, and every time I see a piece of art that is strange in execution and/or in concept and go WOAH!!! Also the TRS-80 Model IV my favorite device ever.

Here is the shortest general list I can come up with off the top of my head. It is not at all comprehensive, but it includes many of the works that were influential to my personality and creative style:

Psychonauts

Okage Shadow King (experienced only through letsplays)

LittleBig Planet series

Gregory Horror Show

Destroy All Humans for the ps2 (too young to be playing this and was bad at it so an older family member finished it for me)

Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess Wii Port (same as above)

All cartoons I watched at age 6 (Invader ZiM, Powerpuff Girls, Felix the Cat, the original Transformers cartoon on VHS but I thought it was boring, classic Scooby Doo, and classic Tom and Jerry)

Princess Tutu (Princess Tutu made me crazy insane + Was young enough to still play pretend when I watched it and thus would reenact every seen with Rue in it as Rue)

Source Engine (constant and early exposure to GMod, HL1+2, Portal 1+2, TF2, and various SFMs and YTPs. This made me normal.) (Watched older family member play these)

The Stanley Parable may also count as Source Engine stuff but I had all of the Narrator lines memorized when I was like, 8 or 9. I was insane about this one in a special way.

DOS games such as Princess Maker 2 and Star Control II

Spore the best video game ever (Watched older family member play this and extensively cheated when I played it myself)

Sid Meier's Civilization IV (Watched older family member play this)

I used to roleplay Flowey extensively on Shamchat during middle school.

2001: A Space Odyssey. I first read the book in middle school and then watched the movie years later and my brain blew up.

Fallout New Vegas (Watched older family member play this)

Older family member also taught me how to program at age 11 using QBasic on a TRS-80 Model 4. This TRS-80 later survived a flood.

As for various concepts that I like. I have been autistic about robots and AI since I was 5, and have been equating the mechanical and the divine since 2018 (looks nostalgically at Omega one of my favorite OCs ever) and so you know. The inherent transgenderism/autismism and various things wrong with my brain and personality of being designed for a singular purpose but because you were designed poorly you are unable to fulfill the role that you were built for.

If you have something more specific, let me know! I am also inspired by every time I see someone on here who posts a drawing and it looks cool.

This is the TRS-80 Model IV by the way isn't she awesome? She's an older sister to me. I miss her every day of my life.

[featheredcritter]

Of all the HL1 scientist models who is the most likely to A. Eat 1/2223456 of black mesa’s foundation B. Cry themselves to sleep C. Waste their grant money on toilet paper D. Accidentally communicate to the Gman via Morse code that they have hemmorhoids?

this guy specifically ^^^

[xenrelay]

[nbmudkip]

i am so sick and tired of the way ppl act abt hlvrai vis a vis cringe culture and “ughhhghh new onceler ewwww” and “the models are so ugly how could you ever take this seriously”. its the same old bullshit thats been vomited up over and over again for all of my niche interests so ppl can feel better about themselves while they put others down and make fun of harmless things. get over yourselves. if people are enjoying drawing cool pics of benrey as an eldritch monstrosity or shipping the science grandpas together who the hell are you to make them feel ashamed of their passions

[jadeyarts]

my piece for the zine was specifically about the dissonance of gordon’s memories of half life canon vs the reinterpretation created by hlvrai - and his subtle identity crisis as a result of it. i put so much detail into the mirrors and their symbolism to represent this theme, but a significant chunk of the details are covered up by gordon... so here’s what the mirrors look like without the filters, and without gordon blocking them. with commentary on their meaning:

the first mirror is the reflection of hlvrai’s canon - the unique cast, and their unique experiences... but with a subtle hint of something else, more horrifying bleeding in - the metatext regarding the universe as a video game and how it effects coomer in particular, and the continued dissonance of the canons - represented by father grigori’s dirty sneakers. father grigori being one of the two hl2 characters that had a brief, if almost unnoticeable, cameo in hlvrai.

the second mirror is the reflection of who gordon is... or who he isn’t? after all, gordon never agrees with anyone’s claims of what must be true of reality in hlvrai. his perception of himself and the perception others have of him must be inherently in-congruent as a result - because they are of two completely different minds about their reality. of course, representing that visually is a challenge conceptually? so, i used a mixture of other gordon interpretations in the fractured glass to represent this idea, in addition to the likeness of wayne himself. after all, technically the media res of hlvrai is that wayne is playing half life vr... while also portraying gordon as a character separate from himself. so who is gordon freeman, really?

and the third mirror... for the most part is the reflection of the broken code and original half life universe, and how it’d been jumbled up to create hlvrai as it is recognized - such as t-posing barney being the other hl1/hl2 character that appears completely intact in hlvrai, aside from the uncontrollable t-posing. of course, the rest was actually largely headcanon on my part - various characters and their codes and their models getting switched around and swapped and changing throughout the franchise and within hlvrai specifically; like gina for instance being the basis of coomer, i think, since they are both the tutorial character - and once i ran out of characters i felt actually conveyed this theme well, i decided to utilize the remaining fracture space by drawing g-man’s suit, hlvrai’s pikachu cameo, in addition to alyx from both wayne’s original hl:a stream and the gnome edition stream of hl:a (and how she is connected to hlvrai through those two streams and through wayne’s hl2vr stream which served as the prototype to hlvrai)

[tigerdrop]

i am just itching to talk about this fic now that its finally hitting its stride so here are some “fun facts” about its development over the past 6 months. these are i guess spoilers if u havent read the latest chapter yet so theyre going under a readmore

one of the things i had to wrangle was what exactly benrey was going to look like in this fic. everybodys got their own interpretations of what he looks like in their heads now, even if a lot of them fall into a handful of the same archetypes: the homestuck gremlins, the brick shithouses, the ones that stick as close to the hl1 security guard model as possible, etc. and you all know by now how much i like big boy benrey. but the thing is that i really wanted to appeal to as broad an audience as i could with this fic, and that meant sitting down and figuring out what he was most likely to look like if he was suddenly transplanted into hl2

the obvious thing is that barney and benrey should look alike, since benrey’s just using the barney model from hl1 in the first place. and the first version of this fic actually had gordon recognizing barney in their first encounter, because to gordon, he looked like benrey! (i thought it was gone forever but kogo dug up the draft for me!)

and the gimmick was that gordon would somehow connect barneys new and old models as looking similar, even though, like, they really dont. at all. from the beginning i knew i was gonna have barney and benrey look alike, but it was only like a day or two before posting the first chapter that i realized i didnt like this version very much. it stretches belief too much, and asks the reader to interpret benreys hl1 model in a specific way that might not jive with their own Personal Benrey(tm)

so i figured the option that was most in line with my goal of “having this fic be as close to ‘canon’ as possible” would be to have benrey jack barneys hl2 model as his own, just like in hlvrai. but i also wanted him to be recognizable as benrey. hence him swapping outfits to the security guard uniform he wears in hlvrai, but “upscaled” to fit the new setting. this makes his given appearance easier both on the average reader and on me - i dont actually have to draw him much differently if i wanna do more fic illustrations LMAO

some more fun facts for u:

i had plans to do a small illustration for every chapter of this fic. but then Life Happened and i opted not to do that. thats why the promo image i keep posting with these updates is as loose and rough as it is - i didnt want to commit to a Huge Image every chapter. maybe one of these days i will do a nicer one

i really wanted to get away with brick shithouse benrey in this one. for personal reasons. but the most i allowed myself was there being a noticeable difference in barney and benreys builds due to, yknow, the whole “combine occupation” thing making a steady meal hard to come by. (seriously, barney is so fucking skinny in hl2. you could break his bones in a stiff breeze. i want to give him a sandwich.)

the first draft had barney being a lot more of an asshole to gordon, and gordon in turn being a lot more of a bitch. but the bits that wayne actually did play of hl2 in vr have him hanging off of barney like a lovestruck puppy, and i thought that was insanely cute. so. he gets to be friend barney now :^)

benreys dialogue is by far the hardest to write, and is one of the reasons this chapter took over 3 fucking weeks to finish. just to get things done i like to put in “[something stupid]” or “[something funny]” and come back to it later. (whether the end results are successful is in the eye of the beholder.) figuring out how to write him closer to canon than fanon is one of the sadder things that i am proud of accomplishing in the past year-ish

the “rough draft” for this fic was 24 hrs straight of me and kogo yelling ideas to each other. this is not an exaggeration. and somehow, during this 24 hr time span, neither of us realized we had a big, glaring, gay gay gay homosexual gay crush on the other. we may be stupid

[luxlightly]

Something that occurred to me when discussing the concept of hlvrai2 with a friend was that, if they plan to use the game Half Life 2, there are no existing models in that game for Dr.Coomer or Tommy. Barney and Dr.Kleiner fill the role of Benry and Bubby but if they want to use the others and not just port in the hl1 models like they did in the acab stream, they'll have to have models made. Wayne has said he wants to have a higher production value in the sequel so it would make sense to get bespoke models both for aesthetic and practical purposes (custom models and rigs mean a lot finer control over what animations and such they can do).

And it got me imagining: if they already need to do Coomer and Tommy (and Darnold and Forzen if they reappear), it makes sense to get custom models for the whole team. Which really got me imagining: unique science team models

Like, not just "copy the look of the hl1 npcs to hl2 style/quality" but like, specifically made to look like the science team as individuals. As simple as different colored shirts or maybe sharp teeth for Bubby or Benry. Actual robotic looking "extendo-arms" Coomer. Tommy with eyes that can glow like the g-man's.

I just feel like that so fits the whole theme of the series: of these 'meaningless background npcs' who, through the story, gained their own personalities, histories, and emotions. Taking that to the next step of having them not even be npc models taken from the game but their own models just for them as the new and individual people they've become is just..... I'M SOFT.

[howdy-hd]

yall say the hl1 guard model isn't sexy but you just haven't ascended yet

would you say solid snake isn't sexy then posting his ps1 model as proof?? I think not bitch

don't blame the man for the limitations of his software

valve chickened out when they made Barney bc they were afraid of the specific brand of sexy that would be birthed from a hi-poly remake of the hl1 guard model