Don't lots of custom Quake engines already support .md2?

Oh, silly place to ask *that* question, nm... 

goddamit I wish I'd been on here yesterday :/

I have a couple of ideas for custom Quake monsters; been in my head for a long time now and they're about ready to hatch. I have always dearly wanted to make models as well as maps but I find organic physiology harder than architecture and QME really is the nit's tits when it comes to intuitive interfaces. Abd Quake's lack of skeletal animation scares me silly. Plus, I suck at anything than it isn't Q1SP :(. A lot.
Nonetheless, I really want to have a bash at this. They're moving under my scalp...I can feel them, I can feel them...UURRK!!!
I think I shall start a new thread. 

I would be interested in such a tutorial. 

Headthump: thanks for mdl. that's a wicked program! it was surprisingly easy to convert the q2 mesh to q1 (i had a lot of trouble just doing that the last time without mdl), sadly, the q2 skin didn't go so well... the skin itself was changed to the q1 palette, but the assignment of the skin to the model didn't... they all got reset to the center of the skin.

Preach: i'd love to see a tutorial that explains how to do the q2 style skin for q1. heck, if you could show me how to convert a skin and keep the q2 style, it would be even better! that's two of us now who want it -- enough yet? :P 

After experiments today, I've discovered that it's actually quite easy to convert a Q2 model to Q1. The process goes like this:
1. Load Q2 model into QMe 3.1
2. Select all vertexes
3. Split all vertexes (!) from the right click menu or by pressing ctrl-s
4. Save the model in quake 1 format.

You might then want to tidy the skin up so the colours are nice, but it'll now be just like the quake 2 skin. Technically you don't have to split up all the vertexes, see below for why it's not practical. Make sure you animate the model FIRST, because messing about with split vertexes will be frustrating.

Also useful to note is that if you import a mesh as a frame, it only matters how many triangles it contains, not how many vertexes. So you can have a joined up model for animating, and a split up one for the skin. Then just import the animation frames into the skin model.

Why it works:
Quake skins have two types of vertex, "Seam" and "Internal". Seam vertexes are ones that appear on both sides of the skin, and are created where a triangle facing 'forwards' on the skin frame meets a triangle facing backwards, if they share a vertex. On the skin, moving the seam vertex on one side will move the other seam my the same amount. Also, if the skin says a vertex is internal and the model says it should be a seam, your model won't save.

If you split this troublesome vertex into two, they both become Internal vertexes. These two vertexes can now exist seperately on the skin, which is loads more useful. You could just split the vertexes that are seams, but you'd have to select them manually, and splitting them all is so much quicker.

Of course, you do still have to make a Q2 model with a nice skin before you can do all of this. But that's a bit easier, q2modeller has a UV editor with things like scale, rotate and mirror.

PS: Does anybody have a good way to convert a simple MD3 to an MD2? I can't get quark to load the MD3...It'd be useful as then people could use gmax to make q1 models : - ) 

i tried doing what you said but i was unsucessful. i downloaded qme3.1 lite (which, btw, i still think is stupid in that you need to pay for it...) and followed all four of the steps. when i tried to reopen the .mdl file in quark, it said it was an invalid format... i tried opening it as .md2 as well but that was still invalid... 

Headthump, do you know how to split vertices in MDL? i can't seem to find that in there... because that one can save to .mdl properly, so it would be great if you can do that... 

You don't have to pay for it, go to http://www.edgefiles.com/files/9100.html and get 3.0 full already. You can then upgrade it to 3.1 using the update file that came with 3.1 lite. It has all those restrictions removed.

As for why it was invalid, make sure that it wasn't saving it as .mdo secretly. It's not very smart at saving things in the right format, and/or changing the extention of a file when you switch file formats. 

Strange to see so many posts about Q1 models,
after showing The Orb & A Dino...

Glad I kept Bones for Q1 apart.
Death is so hard to skin. 

it worked this time... last time i tried to get it, i got a 404... maybe the server was choking. :P thanks for the link Preach.

how do i make sure it's saving in the right format. i think it is saving as .mdo because only qme will open the thing again.
i selected .mdl from the drop down list, yet the filename was still .md2, when i saved, it was "baron.md2.mdl" but it still wouldn't open. 

what happens if one quake monster has multiple models... like, one model for when it's alive, one for when it's shooting and one for when it dies? that means, i'd need to precache three models, what does that mean from a memory standpoint? is it bad for the engine? will it cause problems/crashes?
__________

btw, Preach/Headthump: i got it! :) now it needs some severe reskinning. :D

MadFox: coincidence, i'm sure. ;) 

Does anybody have a good way to convert a simple MD3 to an MD2?

I haven't tried it, but Milkshape is supposed to allow MD2 import/export and MD3 import/export. So it seems possible.
http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/ 

Selecting it from the dropdown should work, maybe try changing the extention in the filename too...Also make sure that all the vertexes really did get split, press ctrl-s a few times afterwards to be sure, as if the process didn't work, then nothing would load the model. 

I was replying to necros' comment about the model not saving right in the post above, and 3 people posted in the time it took...

Three models will take up three edicts and require three times the skin memory, but the rest of the model data is fairly small in size by comparison. Looking at them doom models then? Because those models have different skins, and so you'd need to use that much memory anyway. 

well, turns out, # vertices does matter. fitzquake refused to load the model because there were too many. some engines will load them (tomazquake, for instance) but i really want to go for compatibility here, and because i like fq.

what's the other way to do it? you mentioned it's longer to split only the vertices necessary. which vertices do you need to split, and how do you recognize them?

in the end, if i can get everything working, i may try to combine all the frames into one model and just switch skins but first i need to do this splitting thing. 

should have thought of this sooner:

how many is the max vertices allowed in regular quake?
the baron of hell model that wouldn't load had 1662, whereas the original md2 had only 279.

splitting all the vertices seems to be a very wasteful way of doing it. :P 

I'd only tested my model in darkplaces, which is a bit short sighted since it certainly has raised limits in that respect. Ok, which vertexes do you have to split?

Well, the first thing is to look at the current skin, and look for vertexes that are on the edge of a section of skin. It's really important to turn on the skin overlay, so you can see the way the triangles are layed on on the skin. Every vertex that is on the edge of a portion of skin will need splitting, as would either form a seam on the model, or would be attached to another, remote part of the skin.

As far as I can see, that leaves you two ways of tackling the problem. The first is to go through, locating each vertex you have to split and splitting it. The best help I can offer you here is to:
1. Mess about with the skin, colour the edges of skin in a bright colour so you can tell where the seperate parts of the skin join.
2. Use the vertex numbers. If you hover over a skin vertex with the pointer, a little box pops up with the number of the vertex. If you select a vertex in model view mode, it's number comes up on the status bar at the bottom.

If the first method is the forwards method, this one would certainly be the reverse method. Split all of the vertexes as before, then start merging vertexes that no longer need to be split, until you get under the maximum vertex limit. To merge them, draw a very small box around them, check that you didn't catch any vertexes on the other side of the model, and then press ctrl-m. Wireframe mode is recommended for this.

Which vertexes can you reconnect? The ones that you wouldn't split : - )
Well, the ones that aren't on the border of the skin is a better decription. Do be careful when you do this, if there are two parts of the model that overlap on the skin, you might end up welding them together, causing a horrible mess of a model, that's irreversible. Save frequently

As to which I'd suggest, it all depends on which is going to be faster, depending on the complexity of the model, whether the skingroups are easy to discern, how close you are to the vertex limit.
#define MAXBVERTINDEXES 1000
is in some version of the quake source, but B usually means it relates to brush entites. Can anybody mode knowledgable shed some light on the limit? 

#define MAXALIASVERTS 1024 came up about 30 seconds later in a search...so yeah, don't just split the vertexes haphasardly, do it as selectivly as possible, and weld things back afterwards.

One more thing to mention is that when you've split a vertex on the edge of a section, it may be possible to join some of the generated vertexes back together, but it's kinda hard to explain when this is possible, and how to do it.

I'll give it a shot anyway:
1. Select all of the triangles around a split vertex that are part of a single section of skin.
2. Assign their vertexes to a new object.
3. Hide all objects but the new object
4. Merge all the touching vertexes
5. Unhide/ungroup. Repeat if desired

That'll take a while though, so only use it if necessary. 

split vertices from the skin view? 

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/zdoomgl/ZDoomGLMd2.zip?download

this is the complete doom2 monsters, items and weapons in md2 format, if anyone wants to lend me a hand with converting them...

i've only got the lostsoul coded and converted so far, but that one was easy -- there were so few vertices that i could do the split all trick and it's ai was simple... 

I have a new hard disk as the old one went bust and was wondering if someone could tell me if it's posible to get doom (full version) from somewhere? I had it on the old HD from ages ago and never thoguht of backing it up. Doom2 would be handy too but mainly looking for doom at this stage. 

Legally? idsoftware.com

Otherwise you could try file-sharing apps such as eMule, but you'd have to filter through all of the DOOM3FINALVERSIONLEAK!!!!.zip files. Or you might be able to ask someone here nicely and have them send it to you, as surely it's not more than 15mb or so. 

who cani I ask nicely? 

You should be able to find doom collectors edition containing doom, doom II and final doom in stores failry cheap altho the file sharing solution would of course cost less.. 

I just checked the source. Glquake and fitzquake have a max of 1024. Software quake has a max of 2000, however. So I should at least bump fitzquake to 2000.

For reference, glquake also has:
#define MAXALIASFRAMES 256
#define MAXALIASTRIS 2048

Software quake doesn't appear to have limits for frames or triangles.