The Smart-Welder STool is designed to make welding large contraptions and forts easier and (much) faster.

Basically, you can select a contraption and the tool will weld it all together using intelligent weld placement to reduce the total number of welds needed. The smart-welding settings can be changed, and there is an auto-select feature that allows you to select an entire contraption in a single click.

Here is a video of the (old) Smart-Welder STool in action:
The auto-select is done by holding down use (default key is e) when left clicking on a prop. This will select any nearby props (and any props near those props and so on - selecting the entire contraption).

View YouTUBE video http://youtube.com/watch?v=Rjgm5ItNtMk

The way it works is that each prop is welded to a certain number of its closest neighbours, and then random cross-contraption welds can be added at the end to increase stability.
The default settings are that each prop is welded to its 3 nearest neighbours (it skips a neighbour if it's already welded to it), and each prop is welded to one random prop in the contraption. However, these settings can be changed to suit the contraption.

I hope people find this tool useful.

Here is the download at garrysmod.org:


By the way, the STool is packaged as a GMod 10 addon, so unzip the file into your "garrysmod/addons" directory.

Changelog:
v2.1 -
+Minor interface fixes and more script comments
+Disabled use of prop protection by default (current prop protection is in flux after the update)

v2.0 -
+Added welding/nocolliding over time to avoid crashes
+Weld to prop ability (hold use/run when right clicking)
+Settable weld forcelimit
+Props deselected after use and returned to their original colour
+Option to use the run key instead of the use key for smart-snap users
+Existing welds can be removed, using refresh welds mode
+Auto-freeze option to freeze props before the weld begins
+Tool moved to "Weld - Smart" on the constraints tab

v1.1 - Added radius nocollide, auto-unfreezing and ability to weld to any entity with physics.

Does it also automatically noclollide every prop in the group or at least a setting to do that, because this will be one of my favorite most practical stools ever if so.

Well there is a setting that nocollides between the props that weld together, so if you have 3 props, if prop A welds to prop B, A and B will be nocollided, but not A and C if there is no weld between them.

I guess you want every prop to nocollide with every other prop? I think there might be a script to do that already. Not sure where that would be useful though...

This script is for automatically welding contraptions, I didn't really have nocolliding in mind.

I build a lot of things that have props merging into each other in every direction so if your stool doesn't nocollide all, please. please, PLEASE make it a setting.

There is a stool that does it but I would rather have it all be possible with your stool as it would remove an extra step of work. Awesome video by the way.

I was actually working on something like this myself, but if this works out well I'll probably just use this. I'll have to modify it to skip certain props, though.

Only thing you might want to add though is a limit somewhere to avoid creating too many constraint/nocollide ents. You'll crash the game if you do.

I made a vehicle quick to show you the difference it makes with nocollide all.

On the right side of the pic is my contraption frozen in place by one prop and has your smartweldweld and mass nocollide added. The one on the left is held in place by the same single frozen prop and has been smart welded with your stool but not mass nocollided.

As I said before you should consider making that a default feature for those of us who literally sculpt out creations out of props which ends up with a lot of props inside of one another.

You know it's pretty easy to modify this to place no collides instead of welds, by the way.


(God, why does this addon forum even exist? No one uses it.)

Wow, this has got to be the most practical and most useful tool out on the forums currently. Wonderful job! :D

Heh, you are the only one I know that has the same first name as me... I will be downloading this for sure.

Well since there's no Scripted Tool forum, and this is an addon, this is the most appropriate forum. It certainly seems like noone looks in here though...
Maybe I should just post in the base releases forum instead?

Maybe garry should realize people don't seem to understand what differentiates this whole "addon" nonsense from normal releases in the first place (except installing it in one directory instead of another). Course that wouldn't be the only forum organizational oversight he's made thus far.

I am speechless.

You are the best! I hate having to weld pieces together one by one on a huge contraption. This really helps it.
Download + Lua King.

*It's got to be, perfect:D*
I am singing right now

because this is perfect man!

Good job, a very nice replacement for the normal Weld stool for large contraptions. I might spend more time building then teetering at Lua scripts.

I've updated the STool to work with any kind of entity that has physics (so it works with vehicles like prisoner pods, sents like turrets etc.).

I have added a couple of options:
1. Radius nocolliding (so that props can be nocollided with nearby props)

2. Auto-unfreezing (so you can make your frozen contraption unfreeze itself when you smart-weld it)

The first post has been updated to show the new download (version 1.1).

Awesome work Dunk. I'm glad to have been a positive influence on your wonderful stool. Can't imagine anything better in this particular department of construction.

This is definitely worth downloading!

You should use OBB boxes instead of radius for finding entities. Or at least to get a size estimate of the ents to tell how close they are by proximity to the current ent being welded. If that makes sense...

Nice work!

(and I love the music in video - from War of the Worlds if I'm not mistaken ;) )

yeh you would be correct i think it's from the stage edition, i should i know my dad got it on dvd for xmas

on topic i love it so much help

Awesome idea.. having to weld 30 blue barrels by hand amounts to headache.

PS. Next time, loose the music on the video thanks :) DS.

That´s very helpfull!

AWESOME. Lua king for you.

This is awesome, one for the most useful STOOLS I've seen thusfar.

Nice work!

Next to the stacker this is one of the most useful STOOLS ever.
It doesn't explain how to auto selects so, how do you?

That seams very useful! Thanks!

You auto-select by holding down the use key (by default e) as you left click on a prop.

It says this in the STool tips at the top of the screen when you select the Smart-Welder.

this is extremely handy good job :D

O.O, you have been in my dreams.

If it's a possibility, could you add an option to weld ALL to ALL? For instance, you've got props 1 through 4, it will weld:
1 to 2
1 to 3
1 to 4
2 to 1
2 to 3
2 to 4
3 to 1
3 to 2
3 to 4
4 to 1
4 to 2
4 to 3

(I know it'll duplicately weld, but it's possible to ignore props that've already been welded to eachother, right?)

If possible, please do make this option.

:edit: SuperV, what, exactly, in my post is dumb? I'm suggesting something here, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting this.

Did you try using the addon? Having everything welding to everything is simply a matter of setting the number of welds high enough. Doing this kind of weld is insanely wasteful of welds, and is impractical for large contraptions. The original weld tool in gmod10 had this "total welding" of all to all built in, but Garry took it out because it used too many welds. The formula for the number of welds in this case is (n*(n-1))/2. Think about it, if you have only 10 props, you have 45 welds, but 20 props you have 190. 30 props you have 435 welds - which would probably crash most servers.

So although it's possible to get this type of weld using the smart-welder, you really don't want to. The whole point of this addon is so you can automatically weld stuff together but without using so many welds.

If you were manually welding a contraption, you would naturally save welds by only welding adjacent props - this is the main operation of the smart-welder - to weld adjacent props for you. (there are other options as well but this is the main point).

Well here's some images for you to use as a reference like you mentioned Dunk.



I also plugged your stool in the actual contraption topic it came from. :)

Thanks again!

This seems to be a wonderful tool but I'm new to gmod and was wondering where I place this .lua file? Like what specific folder does it go in? Any help would be much appreciated.

Gmod Newb

Edit: I did do a search on the forums but nothing popped out at me since there are way to many threads with the word "install" and ".lua".

To install the Smart-Welder addon (and any other scripts packaged as addons), unzip the file into your "garrysmod/addons" directory. This should create a folder inside the addons directory with the name of the new addon.

So for this addon, if you unzip the smart-welder zip file into the addons directory, you should get a new folder like this: "garrysmod/addons/smart_welding".

Thank you very much Dunk, and thanks you for not beating me up cause I am a newb to the GMod world. Peace

Funkay demo movie music

Also I have to do a presentation on my interests, which includes GMod, for school, so this'll definitely help. You saved me from an F, you should feel fuzzy inside now.

This officially rocks, nice work.

In a future version you should have the strength welds option so we can make vehicles destructable.

Well I just implemented settable force welds in like 5 minutes, it's just annoying having to create a new file profile on garrysmod.org every time I make a tiny update :(

Does anyone have any other ideas for changes before I have to upload again?

I can't think of anything else I'd like to see to be honest. Very nice stool.

I was gonna say if there was a way to check for props by proximity using OBB boxes instead of radius that might give better results for some complex contraptions. Or at least using the OBB center instead of GetPos.

Also maybe a nocollide-only and parenting -only mode so that you can attach detail props without constraint wobbling or lag.

Is the demo music a remix / cover of Jeff Wayne's musical version of War Of The Worlds? Where can I get it?

Also: Awesome stool. I needed something like this literally yesterday and I came on the forums to look for it.

The music is a remix by Jeff Wayne for the War of the Worlds PC strategy game (which is quite old now, but still awesome).

If I don't receive any other ideas within the next 2 hours, I spose I'll just release what I have at the moment.

I'm working on a way to do OBB checking, but it's a bit trickier than I thought. I don't have much time though so I might resort to using a little short cut I've come up with (still would work, though). Don't hold your breath for it though as my gmod is acting up so I won't get to test it until later tonight.

I want an option to select world. Or to weld all selected things to world.

Please send me the War of the Worlds music remix , and you are totally Gold star'd.

This is a really awesome STOOL. You could be a great inventor someday (making things that people need but never really would've thought of). Just downloaded v1.1!

Could you please post alternate download links... garrysmod.org is currently down.

This is a great idea. It looks like something that will be very popular.

Works great.... makes building many times easier. It would be cool if this feature got integrated into gmod.

i think I have spotted a bug sometimes when i use the smart-welder. it works fine the first 2 or 3 times but after that it stops working. i can select props but it won't weld them please help.

I saw/see that bug too, But I wasn't sure if it was just the server being stupid.

If someone wants to PM me with a more detailed bug report, I might be able to figure out what's wrong. Include any error console printouts. The only thing I can think of is that the list of selected props is getting out of date because you are deleting or undoing props that were selected - although there's code to fix this, it wasn't ideal since you can't tell when a player removes something using an undo.

If you make sure to press reload to fully reset the selection before choosing your props, this might fix it. I'd be interested to know if you still get problems even doing this.

Very, VERY handy tool. This should be getting more attention than it is right now. I am not sure that smartnocollide works the way it should, though. I have already modified it to give me the option to just do no-collides in place of welds. I will probably modify it further to give me the option to make maximum welds (n choose 2) welds with n the number of props selected. I truly believe that the collisions are far more computationally expensive than the constraints themselves. I will probably run a few experiments when I get home to test this hypothesis, and I will post results afterward.

There are no downloads, could you please add one?

Yeah, garrysmod.org is back up, but now that link isn't working.

God, I love this thing! It helps for when I'm being a newbie and spawning copious amounts of barrels. Ha ha, I do use it for building towers and stuff, but that's kinda hard now because of this dumb glitch. Oh well, hope I can fix it soon.

I will love this tool. I am downloading it now. I will let you know what I think of the tool after I use it.

Very nice tool. I really like the way that this tool works. My boat contraception welded real well, (I have been having trouble welding things inside of things), but your tool welded inside props real good. Thanks.

I do have one idea. Move the tool to the next menu up, and place it right under the weld tool. Then we can select the weld tool, the easy weld tool, and the smart weld tool all from the same place.

It has been a couple of days now and I still use the Smart weld tool. Wow it is real nice.
Maybe you can help me with this:
With your talent you could make a Script or mod that will change the balloons ropes to invisible. That is my greatest need for gmod10. But no one seems to be interested in doing this. I have posted a few time about this with no response. Since you are a lua king maybe I can get some kind of answer from you. I hope so. I have a post in the Lua/request section. Please look and see.
http://74.52.38.2/showthread.php?t=290070

Now back to the right post. I use this smartweld tool a lot. It is so easy to use. Before the Smartweld tool I would struggle with welding props to the inside of contraptions but not any more. Thanks.

I was under the impression that you could make ropes invisible by setting the rope width to 0.

Edit: Ah never mind, you mention that the rope width option isn't there in GMod10...that does seem rather odd...

Greatest STOOL ever.

Nice I needed this

This stool is incredible, it makes making things so freaking easy it's not even funny.

Makes nice stable rockets in my favorite gamemode, spacebuild.

This was awesome for making http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/s...46#post4753746 this and http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/s...d.php?t=291000 I LOVE this tool thank you so much for making it :excited:.

WOW Awesome tool :D
Something more useful :D

Very useful

Could you add a tool to make every selected item freeze?
I know there is currently an option to unfreeze every item

Wonderful stool. Could you add a radius circle like a circle that shows up when you move the radius meter thing to make it easier to know which props are going to be welded. Also add a height meter.

This is easily one of my favorite stools. Perfect for building large contraptions, only suggestion would be, when goes through all the props, when it welds weld large/heavy props to other large heavy props (when available) and small props to small props, then to large props.

This would make large contraptions with small parts and large parts even more sturdy.

Great Stool!

However I have encountered a problem, on my server which runs Spacebuild, the welder seems to break alot, once and awhile it works but most of the time you can select things but it refuses to weld when you right click, and just sits there green as ever.

Any help?

Though I haven't even used it yet, i gotta say this seems like an EXTREMELY helpful and amazing tool. (Oh and why does everyone call it a STool? Whats a STool?) There's a gold star coming your way =). Oh, and a Lua King and a Useful. I'm quite generous with ratings I'm sure you wouldn't mind :p

STool (Scripted Tool)

Congrats on an awesome Add-on. That music sounds familer in the video though. Sounds like War Of The Worlds.

Very, very nice. Now I can build twice as fast and solid. What would also be nice is that you can choose between welding and nocolliding.

Is there an fix for the incredible it causes when welded lots things from PHX and other?
Its hard to create an space station when you're lagging like hell

Genious!

This is a lifesaver when it comes to making large contraptions, gone are the days when you have to spend 10 minutes welding something, then it turns out you didn't select something.

Now, I can do it instantly! THANKYOU!

Bumping this as it's helpful, thanks!

After unziping this, the wireframe shows up whenever I use the Weld tools.
There also is no SmartWeld stool in my list.

I use a clean installation, apart from the water lua.

Damn.

I've had this for the longest time (Since I downloaded gmod 10) and I beleive it is pretty much the most useful stool, at least until Jinto gets vmf suite done! Thanks a lot! Grat Lua-ing!

I haven't seen an update on this STool for a bit now, just thought, would it be possible to make the tool handle lots of welds easier by making it weld like this
1. Freezes all objects
2. Removes all previous welds
3. Incrementally adding welds and nocollides at like 25 per second, so it won't overflow cause it seems to make it not add any welds > 100 at the moment(Also spams console).