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.