Is it at all possible to get a quake1 .mdl loaded into milkshape to have some new animations-made via using bones? (or any other program, I haven't touched em MS3D in ages, but i dont remember mdl support being very good). Id like to do some animations for ....a project, but i dont want to do them by hand (nor do I really have the ability to, qme doesn't like me) 

The person to speak to about this is necros, definately.

but i dont want to do them by hand...qme doesn't like me

I share your pain. 

The quake models don't store any bone info,so you'd have to set the skeleton up yourself. But once you did that, there's no reason why you couldn't use them to animate it. If the export to mdl format is lacking, then you can export to md2 or md3, and then convert it using quark. 

afaik, milkshape should accept .dxf or .3ds format, which can be exported from qme, so just load the model in qme, select a frame you'd like to use for the skeleton, then export that one. import in milkshape, rig it, and start animating. it works very well! ^_^ 

that shouldn't be a problem. You will have to convert the bone positions into keyframes for your .mdl's. I don't know if Milkshape does it (hard to imagine with the Half-Life and Quake support it would not have that sort of functionality) but Blender has a very good md2 model plugin script as well as skelatal to key frame conversion built in. 

walk around j00r map, then type "editsounds" in the console and ding! there u go, u can bring up this menu in the editor as well by typing editsounds into the console window there, gg. 

you are the king of cool for that tip :) 

let's not get carried away here :D 

I'll try that when I get home from work. Top of the day to ya! 

afaik, milkshape should accept .dxf or .3ds format, which can be exported from qme...
Erm, the uh, fully working version of qme i have does not do this. the newer qme (lite?), crippled abandoned version (yet somehow is still for sale) might, but it has that frame limitation. 

I guess you meant export one frame, animate using that, then export and somehow merge into the original? I'll try that but seems more difficult that it should be. 

what have u done with scampie?! :D 

well, someone gave me a full version of the demo... (preach?)
but anyway, yeah, as long as the number of vertices are the same, you can export, bone (heh) and animate, then add new frames into a preexisting monster, no problems.

I'll try that but seems more difficult that it should be.

what other way would there be to do it? 

If you've got the full version of 3.0, then download the demo of 3.1. It contains a patch that will upgrade the full version from 3.0 to 3.1 full. There is a good reason to do this, as 3.1 will save models as .md2s. These can be imported by milkshape with all the animations intact.

There are two slight problems with this method. One is that you'll lose some precision in the model with all the conversion, but quake isn't too accurate anyway, so no biggie. The other is that you'll rig the skeleton to one frame, and it'll match up with any new animations, but the skeleton will remain totally wrong for all the other frames the model will have. So if you wanted one animation based off the stand pose, and one based off the attack pose, you'd need to rig the skeleton twice. Also modifing previous animations would probably turn out badly, as the skeleton would only line up in one frame.

Basically though, if you just create whole new animations you should be able to do it with no troubles. 

excessive faces 33668. (crashes fq with no error) (fully sealed and vised)
i'm guessing this is actual wpolys and the only way to reduce this is to actually get rid of brushes and therefore faces. am i right?

also, marksurfaces... do they reduce along with faces? 

is a bit unusual to hit, but AFAIK they are just visible brush faces. Marksurfaces I'm still not sure what they are (except being a problem in some maps).

You could try inserting a big solid brush over some more complex brushwork and see how the faces/marksurfaces are reduced. 

i managed to get faces under 32767, but marksurfaces is still over 39000. and the game still crashes. :( how can i lower marksurfaces more without having to take out too many brushes? 

if a face occupies more than one leaf, it will have one marksurface for each leaf. The only practical way to reduce marksurfaces is to reduce faces, as far as i know. 

well, thanks for the info i guess. :\ more pruning is in order then. 

afaik, milkshape should accept .dxf or .3ds format, which can be exported from qme, so just load the model in qme, select a frame you'd like to use for the skeleton, then export that one. import in milkshape, rig it, and start animating. it works very well! ^_^

How exactly do you get the animation from milkshape into the .mdl file?

I exported a frame from qme (lwo seems to be best for this), made a skeleton, and silly test animation in milkshape. I export from milkshape into md2. I load the new md2 in qme. I export the frames of the new animation (to lwo/dxf/hrc, whatever). I open enforcer.mdl and import the frames but the mesh is messed up. See:
http://s94249274.onlinehome.us/example.jpg
Note- that is a view from the front (!).

I *think* this could be avoided if there was, god forbid, some documentation on compiling to quake .mdl directly from milkshape. But for the life of me I can find none.

Eh? 

judging by past experience with the same problem and the name or the frame, i'm guessing you mirrored the whole model along the x axis? this screws up the order in which the tris are stored or something like that, so they are all flipped around. have you tried doing animations or a frame without flipping the model? did that get screwed up? (it shouldn't). afaik (and that's not that much) redoing the animation from scratch is the only way to get it working, so you'll have to reanimate the firing frames for the other side...

if anyone else knows better, please speak up, cause i hate to have only bad news. :\ 

It's actually a fairly simple fix to get all the triangles facing the correct direction. Convert the model into a single object, then go to the object transformations. Set the scope to the whole scene. Set the scale on the x axis of the object to -1, and it should now work. Then you can reconstruct objects or reset the pivot if you need to do anything else with the model in qme(although hopefully you shouldn't need to) 

I've played yesterday night SM40 contest maps, and I would like to reproduce the "foggy" effects I found into Mike's FMB_SM40 map. So Mike please, could you explain how do you achieve such this kind of effects ??? 

Fog... glad you liked it. First, take some dry-ice (but be careful as its surface temperature is something like -78c) and drop it into a bucket of water.

Alternatively, a simpler way is to use the _fog entry in the Worldspawn for your map. I used _fog 0.05 for Fmb-sm40, which gives a fairly good effect.

Unfortunately, this is only good for FitzQuake as other engines seem to produce fog in a different way. For example, DarkPlaces seems to just darken everything and this was not the effect I wanted. In FitzQuake you can also enter fog as a command at the console (for any map) so if you load Fmb_sm40 you can adjust the fog before your very eyes.

For anyone who has seen real fog, you would know that it enhances light and gives an almost glowing effect without necessarily making things darker.

It does obviously cut down viewing distance and just for fun I tried it with The Marcher Fortress. It completely ruined the outside areas - the skybox is too far away and became invisible and the skybox was one of the things that made the outside areas look so good.

So, use it carefully and I would recommend understatement rather than the opposite.

Hope that helps. 

you should actually do four numbers for fog in the worldspawn -- density, red, green, and blue, where all 4 numbers should be between 0.0 and 1.0. I think the reason you had problems between fitzquake and darkplaces is that they handle the incorrect worldspawn differently.

Also, you should be able to do "fog" instead of "_fog", though i don't know if this is true for all engines and whatnot.

example: "fog" "0.1 0.3 0.3 0.3"