... Inever finished Zerstorer... maybe I should consider it ;) 

 

This one:
http://www.youtube.com/user/megalodonNL#p/u/0/-7UeYdAGjjE

I'd love to know what programs people use here that are still into quake1 modeling/animation...

There's not much info on making Q1 baddies :) 

Looks good, although I thought its arms are unskinned.
The player looks like in deathmatch.

There are several programs for modelling in Quake. They are old but sufficient.
Each have th�ir own specifics.
Here are a few links of the programs I use.

Qmle is more for modelling
http://www.xs4all.nl/~renep/quakeme/

The Old Quark4.07 has a model studio
http://quark.sourceforge.net/

Weapon:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~renep/qmehelp/tutmyfirstmdl.htm

Binairy for Quake mdl
http://tfc.duke.free.fr/coding/mdl-specs-en.html

Preach Modelling Help (Very Good!)
http://www.quakeexpo.com/booth.php?id=32

Wally is more for texturing.
http://www.telefragged.com/wally/ 

Thanks for replying. I'm currently looking into Blender and already had Qme installed. It's easy to use .dxf and .mdl formats to swap files between the two programs.

Question: what exactly is the the limit for a model in a modern engine? Does anyone know? 

BTW: nice link to that modeling help indeed, thanks again :) 

480 height is the limit for a texture and engines tend to crash with non-power of 2 textures. Although all the id1 tex's are non power of two, its worth bearing in mind if a mesh crashes the thing and you don't know why.

Frames limit is 256 - any more than that and you'll need to split the Qc file, although thats the advanced class.

I don't think there's a limit on polys, but there probably will be. Haven't tried hirez. 

The Sky.

Read Binairies.

CONSTANTS
Maximum number of triangles: 2048
Maximum number of vertices: 1024
Maximum number of texture coordinates: 1024
Maximum number of frames: 256
Number of precalculated normal vectors: 162
 

it should be noted that in stock glquake, i believe max triangles is 1000? or something really low (even though dos/winquake have the limits madfox posted).
i believe most (all?) modern engines based on glquake have upped the limit to match software quake.

also, non-power-of-2 skin crashing an engine sounds like bs to me. that would make the engine crash whenever it tried to run the game since all the skins in stock quake are non-power-of-2. it might have been that weird bug with the top corner pixel colour or something, although that usually just makes the whole skin black. 

Although all the id1 tex's are non power of two, its worth bearing in mind if a mesh crashes the thing and you don't know why.

I've seen a crash from bad skin size and I don't know why. Playing safe I've fixed it in the past by making the skin a power or 2. 

but isnt that only if you tried to use voodoo cards and minigl or whatever it was called. 

When I read/watch general low-poly character tutorials online, I see the artist work with quads and they only split the quad in triangles at the joints for proper mesh bending.

However, Quake 1 models can only have triangles, right? No quad polygons. I remember reading that somewhere and every original Q1 model I've observed in Qme, is triangular all the way. 

Quads are only a visual thing anyway - in reality they're still split into triangles, you just don't see it.

But yeah, triangles only. Since there's so few polys you'll need the extra control anyway to get the precise dimensions right. 

"in reality they're still split into triangles, you just don't see it. "

If I read that statement above, I'd think I don't have to manually split the quads into triangles...

However, I've done an experiment with a simple object that only had quads and loaded it into Qme. Qme would then split the quads into triangles, but it did so by cutting/deleting the quad poly into half :) 

Forgot to add that in the Preach Quake Expo tutorial (day 2:
http://www.quakeexpo.com/booth.php?id=32&page=91)
he doesn't mention triangles at all (or I've missed it) and gets a default object in quake. Yet the weapon model in the same tutorial (day 3), is all triangles again...

Perhaps the md3 export already took care of the quads or gmax and blender work differently in that regard?

I'll figure it out. Perhaps I'll just model with quad loops first as in a great low-poly tut I found and then later fix it to be triangles and lower-res. On the other hand, I also observed a female .md2 model in Qme and I'm amazed how efficient that was done. You can clearly see how it's NOT just extruded loops. Instead, every part of the model is carefully optimized in triads in a very specific manner. For instance, there's some lower detail on certain parts, like the arms, but the vertices are moved around just right so that the shoulder and/or forearm still has necessary accents. The poly's that are saved this way are used to make a nice female buttocks :) Man, that's so awesome! I think that must be Paul Steed who was probably already working at id at that time... what a freak! 

The most important thing I do in gmax is to work with an "editable mesh" type object. In the modify tab you then have the option to select by face(which automatically goes down to triangles), or by polygon (which preserves the quads if the model is made of them).

That tutorial is no longer state of the art, fiddling around with Quark can be replaced with
http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/md3tomdl.zip
or the other tool I can't find a link to right now.

Also, for some great examples of low-poly work, including some helpful tips on the cheapest way to create properly deforming limbs, check out the low poly thread on polycount:
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=41232 

Thanks for that missing link about Gmax, Preach.

Those guys at Polycount still haven't finished their main webpage... how many years is this?

BTW: you're not 'Preacher' that created the map Aerowalk, are you? 

Afraid he pre-dates me by a little while, 'tis a great map. 

http://members.home.nl/gimli/murkey1.jpg 

That get's asked a lot... 

@ Lardarse: What gets asked a lot? Whether Preach is Preacher, or any of my other questions in this topic?

@ MadFox: a modified Ogre, I like it :) 

It's the original Ogre, but he wasn't costom enough. 

 

The oldogre is now feared and worshipped by all the other ogres. 

madfox sobs in russian bablefish...