Today I'm launching a bi-annual feature called "Model of the Week" where I offer a new quake model for use in maps. This week: waterfall.mdl

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/waterfall.zip

This model comes with a demonstration map, which uses quoth's mapobject_custom to add the model to the map*. Extract the map into quake\quoth\maps and the model into quake\quoth\progs. I recommend viewing in winquake first, and then in stock fitzquake to see the "progressive enhancement".

Usage:
waterfall.mdl is a 32 polygon model, measuring 64 units wide and ~192 units tall. The origin lies dead centre of the bottom of the waterfall. Place it in your map accordingly, with angles facing outwards, and set the frame to 6 for the loop animation. The model comes with 5 skins:
Freshwater(0)
Effluent(1)
Molten(2)
Blood(3)
Toxichem(4)
This covers the main fluids in quake maps, but if you need something unusual or a better match for your water texture, the model is easy to customise. Simply inserting the desired water texture as a skin will create a reasonable effect, although adding "waves" to the top and bottom is strongly recommended so that the flow can be read easily.

Care has been taken to ensure that no visual artifacts can be seen behind the waterfall, but if you want to let players get behind the waterfall you may want to look at the flowflat sequence, which is not as tall as well as being flattened, so that it can be used for the back-face.

Advanced usage:
If you poke around the model you'll probably notice the spring and dryup sequences. These two animations were actually a happy accident, they were a byproduct of creating the main loop which I realised could be useful about half way through modelling.

If you want to use them to create a waterfall that starts and/or stops you will need to tweak the model a little bit. The important thing to do is to ungroup the flow animation. This lets you line up the frames so that the interpolation and waves move consistantly. To make the animation smooth always transition from spring7 to flow1 and from either flow8 or flow16 to dryup1.

So Preach, I don't want a 3 page diatribe on how you made this thing work but...would it be possible to make a custom-designed waterfall model with a more complex flow within a static model?
We really shouldn't be talking here, but I know somewhere more private - e-mail me.



*Just to note use of quoth is just me doing the laziest thing that would work - the quoth mod is not doing any clever behind-the-scenes stuff to enhance the effect. It simply precaches the model and displays it in the map.