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" 

the skybox is too far away and became invisible

I can't speak for DP, but in FQ ( and anywhere else I've seen fog ) the skybox is removed entirely, because the volumetric effect would break the illusion skyboxes are supposed to create and....you wouldn't be able to see the sky if it was foggy anyway :P 

I already known the fog console command, but I never tried it as a worldspwan field (BTW, I didn't know that it was possible, so that's why my question is...), so thank you very much for these great information !!
As well, I've already noticed that with fog you wouldn't be able to see the sky anymore.... anyway, the effect should be particularly dreadful into a cemetery for example....
Thanks again for this cool "ambiance effect related" information... 

In the original Nehahra engines, my upcoming NehQuake 3.01 and GLQ 1.26, you can have both visible skybox and fog. Not every combination is possible, but in most maps it works and can have a stunning effect.

Marcher is not well suited for fog because of the skybox size, rich colours and scenery. 

The FitzQuake ReadMe gave the syntax as either/or.

If you use all four numbers with Darkplaces, I now know that it works as intended in Fmb_sm40

One lives and learns. 

Fog setting with 4 number works fine, so let's go for a "british weather" like map ;D 

would be rain, not fog. And plenty of it. 

I you can see the sky: it rain, if you cannot see the sky: there's fog ...doh !! Summer starts on 31 of july, and stops 1st of august... peraps you can see the sun by these 2 days, but not more in the year... doh !!! 

'kin' 'ell! I haven't seen fog that thick since I was a kid. 

here's what *seems* to work:

- export frame from qme (as lwo)
- import .lwo into milkshape (use the lwo thats the top most, theres a couple lwo import versions)
- rig and animate in milkshape. this is weird because you're animating with the model mirrored (enforcer becomes left handed, for example, i didnt notice this until necros pointed it out).
- export as quake2 .md2
- load .md2 into qme
- export new animation frames (again, using lwo)
- load existing model (enforcer.mdl in my case) in qme
- import previously-exported frames.
- for the new scene/frames, you have to scale bye -1 in x-axis, and also rotate -90 degrees on z axis.
- now a new animation is working and actually has the same mesh & skin as the existing id model.

Subject to change of course. Dxf is a horrible format and milkshape needs way better documentation. 

that is a lot of steps.

usually, what i do is:
-export a frame from qme
-import into 3ds
-rig, animate (and yes, i noticed the reversal too... not sure what causes that though.)
export each frame to dxf files (i don't mind them)
-import them into the model.

can you not export frames in milkshape directly to dxf or lwo or whatever? it seems a lot of extra steps saving as md2 and all that...

also, preach, thanks for the info about resetting the faces. i never ran into exactly the same problem myself as it was under different circumstances that the faces got reversed. :) 

can you not export frames in milkshape directly to dxf or lwo or whatever? it seems a lot of extra steps saving as md2 and all that...
Remember when i said it sounds more difficult than it should be? :|

If theres a way to export individual frames, I don't know it. I went through each frame, while in animation mode, and exported, but it only exported the first frame each time. Sigh.

Also for the record, I just tried rotating/mirroring the mesh in milkshape after the initial import, just to be able to animate non-mirrored and on the right axis as what it will eventually be, and that created a huge ungodly mess. I'll stick with what works for me at the moment, its only a few small animations I want to do anyways.

(and yes, i noticed the reversal too... not sure what causes that though.)
Probably the discrepancy between file formats and how they store data.

Whew! 

it seems like it would be easier to export all of the frames from milkshape into one folder, create a .qc file listing the frames, and compile it into a mdl with the original Id tools.

http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/graphics_edit/id_utils/util3d.zip