It explains many things so ;)
Thanks for the infos ... 

Good organic model too.

The chest area protrusions, and shoulders and back as well, on my player model are armored seams.

On the sides, those long polies are just a holding place until I get to working it over with some extensions, 

Is there any chance you could combine all your MDL posts into a few tutorials and post them at QExpo? I'd love to have all the information you've posted all in one spot and organized by topic. :) 

Damn fine, effecient, modeling on the alien chick. Not a wasted poly on the whole body. 

Did someone say underage boobies??? 

Sure, I'll put 'em all together, and edit them nicely. Maybe even put together a proper full tutorial with pictures and stuff. It'll give purpose to the booth at least. 

Raise crotch, lengthen legs, shorten torso.

Lose at least half the polies in the feet.

His profile is off, with the forehead being very far back and the mouth sticking very far forward.

Lose the thin lip edge on the shoulder pads - if you're going to have shoulder pads that thin you can just communicate that edge in the texture. Otherwise, make it big and thick. Same goes for the bottom of the torso armor.

The neck should come more out of the front of the chest than poking out of the top like a chimney.

He needs an edge turning pass to fix the contours, especially the edges shared between the two big pairs of tris where the nipples would be, and the two at the top of the large pair of tris at the bottom of the armor.

All the detail in the head is going to turn into a huge mess in-game. Quake's probably not the engine to model nostrils and ears onto your characters - there were more reasons besides performance that the quake characters all have cubes for heads, like the integerization Preach described. 

that's a quite a check list, and it should keep me busy. I'm wondering if in the neck as shown in #3047 the contours are the reverse of what they should be. I built the neck by extending from the clavicle area, but if it looks chimney pipe like in the shots, I likely goofed it.

I'll decimate the models down to lower polies if in game test show them to be unworkable. At about 1200 faces each, the ghoul and v-weapon flachette came out okay (no substantial animation on the ghoul, the flachette though worked well as a complete replacement for the double barrel SG). 

Always go by existing models in a game when modelling for it. Quake guys have blocks for hands and feet too. I mean, look at shamblers - they walk around on tree stumps.

When someone is standing up perfectly straight their spine will still have an S curve to it. Your neck will tilt forward a good twenty degrees at the shoulder line and curve up into the back of the skull. From a side perspective, the nape of the neck is roughly centered on the peaks of the shoulders. 

I see that now. The nape, instead of being an indented curve as it should be is just a straight slanted slope on my model. It also makes the shoulders look hunched, rounded and weak. No player would want to be that guy no matter how unsavory I make his character!

I remember my sixth grade art instructor yelling at me about making smoke pipe necks, and I thought she had scared them out of me. Glad she isn't around to see that neck. 

To test out concerns that the relatively highpoly player model may be problematic in the Quake engine, I did a rudimentory walk cycle, flailed the arms around a bit, and had him revolve in a circle for the standing frames. I then replaced the soldier model to get him in game. Here is a screenie -

http://img234.imageshack.us/img234/926/atmos0000054xq.jpg

Tested with DarkPlaces, there were no problems; AquiRe's revision of the NehQuake engine is the target engine for the mod and the model should work fine there as well.

I've also taken a number of suggestions -- I've pulled the face back into the head and reworked the neck and armor and made the shoulder/arm connection deformable. I still need to add edge loops and structure to the knees.

This is a picture of the wasp

http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/4373/waspscreen7bj.jpg

-- an insectoid with a mounted nail gun and lizard head. Though, the lizard skull makes him look more like a dragon, at least without a skin on him. I've fully animated him and have him working nicely in game. I just need to skin him, and change a few things in the QuakeC. 

but I hope it's not too small and buzzy, otherwise it might suffer from Daikatana syndrome! 

We should be thankful to Romano for discovering so very many things not to do in a video game title. A true pioneer. I'll never forget the first time I got my ass kicked by a mosquito in DKT, yelling out, 'THAT just did NOT happen!'

Wasp is a little smaller than the drone in Operation Urth Magic. I want him to spawn from niches and crannies. I thought that was a really effective attack when implemented in Doom3 with the ticks.

After I finish the sound (working on it tonight), gibs, and skin, I'll upload him to the Inside3d repository for anyone to use in their mods. 

 

Why are his legs so short? It looks like they've been amputated at the knees. 

model needs to be adjusted up about 16 units to fall square with the floor. Blender to Quake ratios and orientation is a bit skewered. 

Actually there might be less to it than that. The quakec for the grunt assumes a certain origin point within the bounding box. I think it's 24 units above the floor. So if you export a model where the feet are more than 24 units below the origin, they will be in the floor. 

Adjusting the QC bounds instead of manually lifting each frame of the model does sound like a less tasking solution. 

can do translations, rotations and resizing over all frames in a model 

actually that's not a good idea becuase quake can only do collision for three predefined entity sizes. 

that the model would no longer be useful as a replacement model if I relied on QC changes (I'll change that head though, only the player model gets the cool goatee). I'll just suck it up and move them around manually in Quark. QmE cries like a little girl when I try to import these models, but with Quark I simply take an md3 version of the model built with Nepherno's tool and convert to .mdl.

My basic design concept, and AquiRe has been helping to hash out things, is to do frame by frame replacement models, and then tag in frames and materials that are specific to the mod. I wont try to replace the entire monster content, but only those that are useful to the mod, and frankly some of the add ons have more interesting creatures. So you are more likely to see a new wraith or scourge
in Symbiote, but no tarbabies (unless I think of a way to nasty them up a notch). 

Tarbabies are already the nastiest monsters in quake! 

so many players hate the tarbabies that I would only want to replace them if I can think of something that they would hate even worse. 

Are you sure you can't load those models in QMe after you've used quark to convert them? It's pretty much what I do for quake models, and I've not found ones that'll load into quake but not qme...with one possible exception. If your models appear to load into qme, but aren't visible in the model screen, and cause 'fatal exceptions' when you try tilting the view, it can be a problem with skin vertices out of bounds. It can even happen if you model has a correct skin, but with some vertices right at the edge of the skin. 

the flachette with Qme, but so far no luck with the other models. I like the vertex painting feature. The ghoul, player and wasp models I have had no success getting them into Qme. However, my attempts have been from MDL to Qme, and MDL does seem to shift the origin point on the models (which is why I use Quark now.) I'll see how they do with the Quark conversions.