that is brilliant. do they stack easily? could one theoretically use lots of them together to create a kind of niagara falls type wall of water?

and yes, needs splash sprites! 

Has splash sprites. or particles. 

Yeah, I actually messed around using a func_togglewall with particles to create a spray effect at once point. It looked very cool, but I took it back out to keep the focus on what the new model can do and not the existing features of quoth(if used in a novel way). Certainly something for people to experiment with in proper maps.

I'm not sure that stacking horizontally would work too well for a few reasons, although tweaks to the model may overcome these. The first is that the random sync flag is set on the models so the waves would not come down together on adjacent falls. Even if they were in sync, the fact that the waves sweep diagonally means that they wouldn't align. Finally the texture itself does not tile in any direction so you'd see a seam without changing it.

Stacking vertically would be ok, but I'd warn against anyone who was intending to carefully tile the flat waterfall effect end-to-end to build a long one. Firstly you'd again not be able to tile the waves correctly because they hit the bottom 2-3 frames before emerging at the top. Secondly the animation is supposed to have faster falling water at the base than the top. Tiling would create a stop-start effect.

A better plan would be to create a stepped waterfall with simply two or three regular falls feeding one another. You could create height variation by having one intersect a second somewhat(although the wave-splash would be somewhat lost) or by duplicating and scaling the animation.

Can I just add how nice it is to get feedback like ^^^^^. I've been tweaking the model on-and-off for a week to the point where it didn't do that for me, and I was worried I'd overworked it and lost what was so great about it at first. So thanks to all you guys for casting fresh eyes on it. Sounds like nobody's cracked out their model editor to find the easter egg though... 

that is surprisingly effective! i think i prefer that than fading in water falls like i did before. especially since it has a proper start/stop animation. 

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/flatnorms.pl

If you edit and save the model with QMe or similar you might notice that the model starts looking odd and flickery in-game. This is because the vertices are disconnected on the face edges, and so the normals don't always point the same way, even if the faces appear adjacent.

The above perl script fixes this by setting all the vertex normals to the same direction in every frame. The script is lazy to the point of hard-coding the model name but it does work. Turning it into a better designed generic perl script is on the cards... 

just used standard blue particles, yeah. they looked kind of cute i guess, but would be much better if replaced with proper animated droplet sprites (they'd start as a single blue drop, then separate into multiple smaller droplets and eventually single pixels, fading to white) and then thrown out of an emitter entity in a similar fashion

to be fair it doesn't sound like a taxing task and is something i've been meaning to take a stab at for a while (although i have zero experience in sprite editing)

as for the falls themselves, i'll see how i get on with stepping and whatnot; it might entail a slight design change. but there is a chance i may drop you an email at some point preach :) 

 

That works great.

Slimeflows coming up. 

Hi all.

If you would like to create something that will be seen (and appreciated) every week by a bunch of TF maniacs, I have two requests:

1. A new animation for player.mdl, where he has his arms outstretched, kind of like this:
http://images.sodahead.com/polls/000589539/polls_preacher_5854_705966_poll_xlarge.gif

I need 1 Standing, 1 walking, and 1 pain.

2. A new player .mdl which is a giant, deformed version of the normal player.mdl. Twice as tall, with a deformed head, as seen at 0:23 at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f77r-vu9xE
He needs: giant_stand, giant_walk, giant_swing_a_club, giant_pain, and giant_die.


I'm not sure how this forum works, it seems to be one long thread(?), please contact me at adonis_paradise@yahoo.com if you can help

thanks,

OneManClan
ps, quick ad: BIG TF games every Sunday at 22:00 GMT, check it out:
www.attackersgored.com 

where is that baron.mdl model that is in nehahra from? i seem to recall it was a converted q3 model or something? is there any way to get the original version to be re-converted? the nehahra version has massive amounts of vertex dancing; more than there should be. 

by evilbastard.

http://planetquake.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Quake2.Detail&id=192

http://www.fileplanet.com/8427/0/fileinfo/DDZ 

I've always thought his TheForgottenOne model would also work well in quake. 

and thanks for pointing me towards theforgottenone as well!

i can also see exactly why there's so much vertex dancing in the neh version: there's a sequence where he shoots a laser out of his eye which they probably deleted after it was converted.
interestingly, i can see that the main improvement of md2 over mdl is that the vertex 'resolution' is per frame, not per model hence why evilbastard could get away with the eye laser animation in q2. 

its seems that the infantry dude from q2 and modified to bastion by kinn is extremely underrated . hes so awesome. and fits the base theme very well 

looks like evilbastard did some extra frames for the nehahra mod as the original ddz baron model lacks those. hmmm not as useful as i had hoped....
it's too bad we didn't know as much about mdl format and vertex resolution that we know now. simply deleting the 'eye laser' frames before converting to .mdl would have increased fidelity by like 400% :( 

theforgottenone (at leats the non-winged version) has the same torso as the ddz model. Although the animations may be diffeerent, might be worth looking into that md2. 

i'm currently looking into what options i have atm...

i considering just re-rigging the q2 model and doing my own animations, since i enjoy doing that. first, it would allow me to just add a sword (which the q2 model is lacking) and do some proper melee swings and such.
i figure i can just use the nice uv mapped q2 model and then try out preach's method of going through the md3 format on the way to mdl and if i can't figure that out, at least i can go to md2->mdl instead.

i'm a little wary of trying to do theforgottenone since the wingspan of that model is fairly large at times. might result is pretty bad vertex dancing and i'd still need to add a melee weapon and melee animations.

when i saw the baron model, i kind of assumed that the sword was part of the original model and that he just held it in his offhand like that q3 model that looks like a crazy hellknight. 

love that model. 

yeah, it's awesome. seems like no matter which model i choose, i'm still going to have to end up re-rigging and then re-animating them. 

Are there any models of trees around I could use? Preferably via quoth custom objects :E 

Are there any models of trees around I could use? Preferably via quoth custom objects :E 

argh sorry :( 

Has one or two tee models, so does soul of evil iirc. I think quoth might even come with a tree model, you might want to check the pack. 

 

So model of the week took a big hit when I lost internet for the first half of August. Still, I didn't waste all of those hours idly, so here's a non-model "model of the week" with modelling applications:

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

It's the threatened perl script for manipulating mdl files. Details on how to use are in the readme.

The future:

Future goals include:

� Adding some code for handling the mysterious vertex normals - including the vertex normal table and finding the index that best approximates a given normal.

� Creating a companion to mdl::list_framedata which provides a list of skindata which ignores whether a skin is in a group or not.

� Including more example scripts.

� Creating a companion module which will load MD3 (then maybe MD2) models into a similar perl structure. Then include example scripts for loading an MD3 and outputting a MDL.

The last one ought to be useful in practice. I was at one point working on a new version of md3tomdl with expanded options for how the conversion would be performed. I abandoned this when the challenge became parsing the config file rather than performing the conversion. Instead I began looking for a scripting language which handled binary files and there perl was...

Anyway, the plan is NOT to have all three model formats load into a single common structure. The thinking is that how you resolve the differences between the structures is the most important part of the conversion, and there's no one-size-fits-all solution (especially when it comes to combining multiple segment MD3s with independent animations). Instead the plan is to start from a basic conversion script each time and customise it in all the relevant places to suit the model in question.