that after you import it into Q1 all the animation will be at 10fps and the vertices will be wobbling all over the place due to them being rounded to fixed point numbers, so even if you have plenty of flexibility, it doesn't exactly allow you to go to town :) 

sure, but my point wasn't that you'd be making better looking animations than a AAA title, only that animating it is not a painful process at all (and, i find, quite fun). 

There's no reason you have to keep animations at 10fps.

Well, there are a few things you have to consider. First is that 256 frames gives you 25 seconds of animation at 10fps. Can you get an entire monster into 12 seconds of animation? Perhaps the thing to do would be to keep slow movements like standing animations at low fps and keep the higher rates for the big/fast things.

Secondly there's the QC support. There's a special instruction built into the QC instruction set for 10fps animation, with special notation and all. So to step outside that confers a minor performance penalty (though clearly it was significant in 1996) along with more verbose, messy code.

Finally I'd worry about how interpolation is handled in all the engines out there. I know that fitzquake takes a lot of care to interpolate well in a variety of situations and ought to handle high fps, but I don't know that all engines do.

Still, I'd like to see someone try! 

you must also halve .yaw_speed because movetogoal will be called twice as fast and so turn twice as fast. 

probably not a huge issue if you don't mind splitting your anims over multiple models if you need more frames, and swapping the models when appropriate.

On a related note it usually makes sense to spread anims over different models if the creature varies size substantially - i've seen models where the vertex accuracy is totally trashed because of just a few frames where the dimensions of the model is large compared to the rest of the frames - moving these "large frames" into a seperate .mdl would have fixed that. The super-hell-knight thing from Nehahra is an example of how not to do it, and ironically the "large frames" that fucked the vert accuracy over in that weren't even used in the end - they were removed from the model after it had been converted to .mdl >_< 

yeah, that really pissed me off. :P
but tbh, i never considered splitting different bounds of a mdl into seperate files. that's a pretty good idea. 

I should have done that with my large and small banners in rubicon 2... 

@Preach, I am trying to understand what you did with your ogre model in Gmax. (workflow) The chainsaw and grenade launcher objects both have blue boxes. They look like some attachment tag, what are they? How did you create them? I assume this lines up with a bone in the hand?

The bone structure for your ogre has a tail bone, what was that for? When you were creating the bone structure, did you start with the spine? Did you mirror the left and right bones?

The ogre is one complete mesh, is that done for a reason? animation etc

Do you know of any good gmax bone/animation tutorials you used?

Thanks for all your help 

So far I have only found this:
http://world-editor-tutorials.thehelper.net/magos.php
Most forums seem to point at this. The bone arrangement in this article is a bit goofy plus the spine is not connected. The article does talk about helpers (your blue box attachment) I assuming this is the same system? 

i don't really know how much experience you have in this area, but this tutorial: http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp covers everything from start to finish. you'll want to check out the last section for rigging.
it was written for 3ds max, but a much older version, so likely there is very little (if any) information that can't be brought over to gmax.
also, for more general information, 3dtotal is one of the best sites i know, with a higher concentration of max users than other places. 

Seems like you've got a handle on how it all works, but I thought I'd add that the blue boxes are a type of helper called a "dummy". They're just like a simpler version of a bone, which is all you really need for something like a gun. You make them animate with the model by applying a "follow constrain" from the dummy to the hand bone. 

And loath as you may be to change the pipeline you got to Sock, give this a look:

http://oasis.xentax.com/index.php?content=downloads

I post this about once every two weeks or so.

Its a multi-multi platform / game model converter, very well maintained (found a problem in BMP format and it took a day or so to fix) and now supports IQM (boned models in Quake with proper UVs).

I use 3dsMax but I know a couple of people go direct from Blender - Noesis - Quake without additional steps.

So what they see in Blender is what they see in the engine. 

And, Blender is free and up to date as well, though it'll need learning. There are lots of youtube tuts etc.

And, Necros, I remember that tutorial from uni :) 

@Preach, thanks I was not sure if you used a dummy or point helper, it is hard to tell the difference. Gmax is not really helpful on showing what things are what.

One thing I would like to request of your md3 to md1 converter is the ability to specify a list of animation names. At the moment they are just a long list of (from 3dsmax). Can a list (comma delimited strings) be specified in the text file you use for the compiler?

- Unfortunately I still need to use Qme to setup the animation names so they can work with the QC file.

@necros, that is a very cool link, thank you. The English in that tutorial is strange, but I guess that is because it was translated.

@ijed, I am close to finishing my model and the pipeline I have at the moment works! All the plugin and converters produce a result which works in Q1. If gmax bone animation drives me nuts, I will check out this other pipeline. Thanks for the link. 

you actually do not have to do that.

in your QC, when you alias the frames with $frame nameofframe1 nameofframe2 etc...

they do not have to match at all. only the order matters.

so if you have 'frame1' 'frame2' 'frame3' in your model, if frame1 and 2 are walk anims and frame3 is a run then you need to alias in order:
$frame walk1 walk2 run1
all the qc compiler does it look at the order the aliases appear in and assign a number to them, so $walk1 = 0, $walk2 = 1.
you can just reference the frame numbers directly in the function macros (and you can use the aliases in if checks and such (if (self.frame > $walk2))

also, check out my qc starter vb program.
it will set up all your frame aliases along with the function macros after you enter the number of frames and such: http://necros.slipgateconstruct.com/utilities/ne_qcstarter/ 

Oh I see! Ok I will just write the QC file assuming the frame order in the file then. 

Using max feels like I am editing a map and the editor is not drawing the links between entities!

Is there a way to show the object links in the viewports? I know you can see the tree structure with the selection (H) window, just wondered if there was something else more visual? 

not that i know of, sorry.
you can always set helpers/bones different colours to tell significant groups apart (like left/right side limbs so you can tell easily when viewing from the side).
i suppose you could looking into connecting splines to objects with follow constraints to make your own visual representation of links, but that would mean doing it yourself.
sorry, that's the best i've got. :S 

I thought it was me not being able to find the visual switch for displaying links between objects. It really makes understanding bone structures difficult, I am surprised there is no visuals. 

It is a bit annoying, it is supposed to be an option which you can enable on a per object basis (so you could choose to just display the links for the chainsaw but not the bones). The option you're meant to tick is in the display panel, which is the 5th panel along on the right hand side. Down at the bottom is a "Link Display" rollout with a tickbox called "Display Links".

It doesn't seem to work though, so unless you can fiddle with it and get something, I think it's a feature of 3ds max that is broken in gmax and nobody ever tested... 

I was trying to enable the option on my ogre and that didn't work, but creating a simple test scene I was able to create two boxes, enable the option, then link them and see the link. So give that a try. 

Thanks, I found the option and it certainly works on some bones and meshes.

I am at the final hurdle exporting all my frames and mesh into MD3 format and the Gmax exporter wants to UV map all the bones and place them in all the frames. Does not make any sense as usual. I also tried preach's ogre model and gmax exported all those bones as well. Any suggestions why the exporter wants to UV map bones? 

loath as you may be to change the pipeline you got to Sock, I know a couple of people go direct from Blender - Noesis - Quake without additional steps.

If I was to try and create a model in blender, animate it and then convert with Noesis to Q1 format, what versions and plugins do you recommend for blender? 

To get exports to work you have to use the Only Objects Whose Names Starts With option to filter out the bones from the mesh. Bit of a pain, but as long as the mesh starts with a letter other than 'b' it's only one keystroke. I am going to get round to replying to your e-mail as well... 

Noesis supports lots of stuff, so any 3d package can output files to it, which then get passed to any game format you like, including .mdl.

Personally I'm still using Max, and exporting to Collada. I can't remember which version off the top of my head (at the office just now) but in the past I've used various other formats such as FBX.

Should really document the process and put it up on the site when I get time - your comments here got me thinking along those lines the other day.