• The lightning bolt models are progs/bolt.mdl, progs/bolt2.mdl and progs/bolt3.mdl. I think that shambler lightning uses the first one. Look in your mod directory and check you don't have a modified version of the model anywhere

• Test different engines and see if they have the same problem or not 

After compiling a new map with the components and using it in a fresh dirctory everything works fine.
My progs directory has got deluted somehow.
Thanks for the advice.

I tried Blender for the modelling part but this engine is so clumsy for a newbee. But it's free so I shouldn't complain.
Gmax has its efforts, but I'm stuck on the export extentions *.gmax and *.P3D. I might as well use Max3d-r4, although I can only work with it on win98. 

To export to MD3 you need the "Tempest" add-on pack installed. Once you have that in place, you can install a better MD3 exporter than the default, but one step at a time... 

Also posted on discord, I did not want to forget about this place. I've had a few people ask me about foliage, so I've posted this model pack with 3 pine tree models. All use alpha-masked skins.

Models:
https://i.imgur.com/uptT7Gc.png

In game preview:
https://i.imgur.com/RXmrcbH.gifv

Download:
http://www.quaketastic.com/files/models/pinetree_set.zip

The zip includes a short readme on how to setup the animation frames if you desire and some lighting tips. (Note in Trenchbroom because of the way interpolation works, the skin will have 'pink' pixels unless you render in Nearest interpolation. In game the skin will be masked properly by the engine.) 

Looks incredible especially animated. Thanks for sharing. 

Thx a lot!! 

Makes me to reconvert my Q1Treez with transparant layers. 

nice additions! 

I hope these get put to good use :) 

Is there any reason to not go crazy using models? Any performance or other technical issues? Redfield's trees led me down the rabbit hole of Quake models plus I've been wanting to make use of foliage for a while now. 

There were reasons about a decade ago, but in 2019, there are none. 

There's still the lighting issue, models don't get lightmaps, they just sample the light value of the surface under their center, so depending on context they will look out of places with the rest of the lightmapped brushwork. Would use them alot more otherwise.
These pine trees are pretty cool though, and the animation is obviously only possible with models, but they work cause it's dark ambient lighting. If you had very directional lighting they could look quite weird.
Pritchard is doing some cool stuff with palm trees and having them as brushes really helps integrated them into the level. 

Is there any reason to not go crazy using models?

It depends. In terms of raw polycount, not really. If you had, say, a forest of animated trees, then you'd see a perf hit, mostly from the vertex animation. The transparency might be a bit of a hit as well.

It would be rather difficult to get nice model lighting using qbsp. You'd basically want to bake all that onto the texture and account for the uniform shading.

You have more flexibility with q3map2 since models can lightmapped or vertex lit (using the lightgrid) on a per-model basis. both methods can looks great. 

There's some chat about this very issue in the quake engine wishlist thread here:
http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61737 

Doesn't FTE already use vertex lighting on models?

Of course i could be wrong, but there is a "vertex" mode in the lightning menu/options. 

Would anyone happen to know if this model has ever been released?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTE_9TXY51E 

I would like some advice for this model.
I am tweaking with the framespeed of the forcefield static.
I added a {self.nextthink = time + 0.01;}; option to the frames,
as I thought the framerate is too slow.
Now I'm not sure if it works allright, as I've seen it switching from end to start.

Also I'm searching for an option to toggle the static.
Now it is coded as killtartget, but I would like the toggle option more.

screeny
forcefield 

Why using tons of triangles instead of alphamasked textures?

An alphamasked MDL can do the trick of morph-target animating tons of pseudo-particles using only a few triangles. You can even combine it with skin animation. 

I'm using it for an old mod and I'm not costumed to alpha channels.
Once made a lightning static with an alpha and a sprite.

I thought combining it with an alpha mask could enhanced it, but was not sure how to do it.
I saw the Pine trees from Redfield, but was tricked with the alpha thingy. 

not sure how to do it.
Just paint the transparent areas of the skin with the color index 255.

Some engines also requires a special pointless flag to be set in the model. 

Backwards compatibility isn't pointless. 

Using a func_illusion, added the texture after skip brush results in this.

Working with alpha's make use of *.tif and *.psd. And that are not the usual import values for qmle. Bmp won't work so I don't know what it is. 

 

pcx

No use, I don't know how redfield made it but I see no way to import an alpha channel in Qmle or Q2Editor, or Noesis. 

mankrip - the assumption is that some existing mdls will be using index 255 as opaque colour, before this whole mdl alpha thing was ever conceived.