@Necros, yeah good point. The original texture design was a stone box but I switched to wood later on. I will convert it all to wood.
@Kinn, oh yeah! I love it, you know it is all your fault that I now make assets designed for the original pixel resolution! :) 

mdl ammo boxes is a feature in quoth, although it's done there to save on model precaches instead! 

Sock, those look awesome. 

Things are going a bit faster now that I have a working pipeline for creating models. So here is my attempt at replacing the medipacks with something more medieval. I have maintained the original footprint/height and tried to create something different in profile shape.

Original pixel vision thanks to Kinn!
http://www.simonoc.com/images/design/sp/q1_health_models_v1.jpg

Any dislikes? 

I've actually got some constructive feedback, it's little things though:

Was skipping the usual red cross on heath items a design choice? I kinda miss it, perhaps if you added a cross-shaped strap over the lid it might have the right subconscious association without looking too anachronistic?

One of the things that I always get wrong with my models is not baking strong enough shading into them. Really make the lower surfaces dark. In fact, the best way to get that gemstone-like red bottle effect is to emphasis the dark colours over the light. I remember doing this years ago painting some High Elves, the closest I can find to the guide I had then is:
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-paintdraw-gemstones/?ALLSTEPS

Finally, I worry a bit about distinguishing the 25 and 15 health packs, although I can see the different shapes and heights when they are next to each other, I worry that if I came to one in isolation I'd be unsure of how much it was worth. A few ideas:
� Make the cap on the 15 health pack more discoloured/mouldy/rotten.
� Push the colour of the rotten bottle away from red and towards brown (difficult to do subtle colour changes in quake, I know...)
� Only apply the super-secret twinkle shader effect to the two large bottles.

I'll expand more on that third option later, but one other idea I've had which may or may not work is this:
Take the highlights on the edges of the bottles, and colour (only) the adjacent borders of the bottle with dark orange fullbright colour. The intended effect is that in bright lighting this fullbright appears just a natural part of the shaded bottle face. In dark lighting these new edges appear fullbright, as if they were dimmer but still visible edge highlights, while the original highlights disappear in the dark. 

hadn't thought about the relative heights vs heights in isolation, but i'd also like to see the cross symbol return.

that said, i kinda just don't like the way they look... like a jar of blood. sorry man, i much prefer the original kits over your new ones. :(

i think i'd rather see the original health kits but with the metal replaced with wood. 

@Preach, yeah I like those ideas, I will add a green/brown tint to the rotten health (15) and stamp a cross symbol on the top of the corks. I can certainly add some fake shadows on the bottom of the jars and some glint at the top.

@necros, I know you are not keen on me redesigning the original stuff, but I really want to get away from tech style boxes. I checked the existing q1 levels with my new items and they fit really well. The items don't look out of place and now have some character/style about them. I might create the originals as a separate pak file so people can have a choice if they are really against my items. 

Take the highlights on the edges of the bottles, and colour (only) the adjacent borders of the bottle with dark orange fullbright colour. The intended effect is that in bright lighting this fullbright appears just a natural part of the shaded bottle face. In dark lighting these new edges appear fullbright, as if they were dimmer but still visible edge highlights, while the original highlights disappear in the dark.

Not sure about this. I'd probably think it was just bad texturing, rather than a design choice to have fullbrights integrated like that. I only see fullbrights making sense when they create an obviously seperate glowy light element, like a rune or a gem.

As for the health packs - I like the shape, I think that's cool. I think it's "too red" though - i'd be inclined to make it a combination of metal and glass, rather than entirely glass - like a mostly metal frame with glass "windows" in. 

Here's a few examples of the super-secret twinkle shader that's been hidden in quake for the past 16 years.

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/gem.zip

You need to view then in game, QMe will not render the effect. I'd suggest whacking them in a progs directory and renaming each one g_rock2.mdl in turn. You can then look at a rocket launcher pickup in game to view them (use the flush console command to update after each file is renamed). Start with the flat one so you know what to expect.

Cookie for whoever can explain it! 

 

Someone took a bite already : -(

I think with a bit less laziness it would be possible to make something that looks a bit smoother as well. In the zip the effects are produced by
1) Randomising each vertex from the whole range of 162
2) Randomising over the first 15 vertex normals on a per vertex basis
3) Randomly selecting one vertex normal per frame and applying it to all vertices
4) Randomly selecting one of the first 15 vertex normals for all the vertices in a frame

They all rely on essentially random selection of vertices because I was too lazy to import the table and start doing dot product calculations. With a bit more work you could create effects that vary continuously through space and across frames. 

dude, that's awesome!
how are you randomising the normals like that? can it be applied to anything? i'd love to get that effect going on an fx model i'm using. way better than just flickering alpha! 

I've uploaded one of the 4 perlscripts I used to make these models at
http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/randnorms.pl

It's a hacky thing I wrote when I was learning perl, there's at least one thing I do which is not best practice. It also hardcodes the filename it operates on(currently gem.mdl) because at the time I didn't know how to parse command lines. On the plus side it doesn't need the perl library I wrote for operating on models, it's stand-alone.

Soon I'll be recreating that library in python because it turns out that perl syntax isn't very readable. When that happens I'll try and create a more readable python script to do the same thing. 

Just a quick thought, when I see any container of red liquid which refills health, I myself tend to think of it as a potion and thus would be rather potent. With my mind coming from that angle, even the smallest healthkit looks like it would have the impact of a megahealth (with the largest looking like it could heal an entire party in coop like a mega). Essentially, all of these look like they would deliver a lot more health than they would running stock qc. 

hmm yes, i think i agree with that /\

what if the rotten and normal kits were closer to the size of the Hx2 flask? (this one: http://lparchive.org/Hexen-II/Images/16-hexen2-items_flask.gif )

also: preach, that script works perfectly! should be noted (and in retrospect i should have realized) that you can't use fullbright colours on the skin otherwise the lighting effect isn't applied.

still, works well and looks very cool. thanks! :) 

That gem looks good n game, Preach although it's a mystery how you obtain the effekt.

Here is the tessla coil.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/tessla.zip

Don't get burned. 

If you are using darkplaces then you will also notice the effect appears to cease working. Now we are sort-of performing a hack here so it isn't that surprising that response is mixed. It's also worth noting that what darkplaces is doing is not entirely terrible(tm).

Lets break down why in most quake engine we get varying brightness by changing vertex normals. I believe this is accurate but correct me if you know better...Quake has effectively a hack to make vertex normals work, by rendering as if there is a single bright source of light coming from a fixed direction. You get brightest light levels by having a normal directly facing that direction, and darkest by facing away from it. You can observe this by rotating 360 degrees on the spot and watching the shading vary on the viewmodel.

Darkplaces rejects this and instead uses all sources of dynamic light in the scene as origins for vertex normals to be evaluated against. This means that the twinkle effects are not visible most of the time, but if you run the quad cheat you can get them to render. 

yeah, that was the first thing i checked after seeing it work in QS. :)

of course, if you're running in DP, it's not much extra work to include a q3 shader script to take the place of the flickering vertices. 

don't know if everyone knows this already; this is mainly useful if you're just modding an already made model:

if you convert a .mdl in a .md2 with q2mdlr9b and export a frame, you will be able to import the md2 into max (with http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/quake-ii-md2-importer ) whil preserving the original q1 skin mapping.

from there you can add to the uv map with normal max tools and then export following the md3 -> mdl route. nice not to have to start from scratch. 

Missed 30 odd posts there.

Did you get an FBX exporter or workaround Necros? As far as I can remember I'm using the default one from Max2010.

Those pickup models look great - we also did this, but ours are fairly un-artistic :( 

nah, couldn't figure it out.
i've since gotten an alternative method which works fine using npherno's md3 importer and preach's md3->mdl converter. 

Recheck my export method when I get home anyway, haven't looked at it in a while. 

After adding the robot arm in my map I see this strange overlapping effekt of the cellbox.
In the framegroup there's nowhere a cellbox sliding diagonal, but in game there is.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/Cclaw.gif
http://members.home.nl/gimli/cclaw.jpg

Whayt is it that makes the cellbox warp? 

Interpolation? 

This example shows the effect, now the solution if there is.

http://members.home.nl/gimli/celbox.wmv